Iraq

This publication is now archived. IntroductionOn October 15, the majority of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are expected to vote against the draft of the constitution in a nationwide referendum. Others are expected to stay home to signal their disapproval of the document and the process by which it was drafted. Most Sunnis agree the constitution, as currently worded, would diminish their rights and further weaken Iraq by handing over additional power to provinces dominated by Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Comprising roughly 20 percent of Iraq’s population, Sunnis say they were marginalized during the draft-writing process and remain suspect of Kurdish and Shiite intentions. Their suspicions were confirmed October 1, when Kurds and Shiites tried to ram through parliament a rule change that would virtually have guaranteed the referendum to pass. The rule change was later overturned, but resentment among Sunnis remains. Under pressure from the United States, Shiite and Kurdish leaders later agreed to last-minute concessions to create a panel in Iraq’s next parliament with powers to revise the constitution at a later date, in exchange for Sunni support for the constitution. At least one major Sunni group, the Iraqi Islamic Party, reversed its previous stance and said it would urge its members to vote “yes” in the upcoming referendum. Still, the changes in the constitution’s text may be too little, too late, some experts say, to turn around the minds of most Sunni voters who feel left out of Iraq’s political process. Sunnis’ concernsIn general, Sunnis say the constitution fails to ensure national unity or guarantee rights for Iraq’s minority communities. “We have been a united country and one people since Iraq was born,” said one Sunni voter, speaking to Al-Arabiya TV on October 10. “It’s clear from the deliberations about the constitution that it lays the foundation for sectarianism and the division of the country.” Other Sunnis say the document was drafted in haste by Shiites and Kurds beholden to U.S. interests. “I don’t accept the constitution because it was drafted by America, not by the Iraqi people,” said another Sunni voter. In response, Shiite and Kurdish leaders accuse the Sunni leadership for their unwillingness to compromise. At least a few Shiites suspect the Sunnis are plotting a return to power in a so-called third coup (In 1963 and 1968, Sunni Baathists came to power in Iraq by taking control of the Iraqi military and seizing political power).Among Sunni voters’ biggest concerns is the issue of federalism. The division of power between the federal government and regional governorates, federalism is seen by some Sunnis as the start of a slippery slope toward Iraq’s breakup. Further, these Sunnis fear that federalism is not only a plot by Shiites and Kurds to give themselves more regional autonomy but also to gain a greater share of Iraq’s oil revenues; Iraq’s largest oil reserves lie in predominantly Shiite and Kurdish areas. Unfortunately for Sunnis, they predominantly reside in resource-poor areas near central Iraq. While the constitution may call for an equitable distribution of these revenues, its wording is at times vague and vulnerable to amendment, says Nathan Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Another concern of Sunni voters is the constitution’s wording on national identity. They believe the constitution will undermine their Arab identity and insist that Iraq, one of the original founders of the Arab League in 1945, be explicitly labeled an Arab state, despite its Kurdish, Christian, and other minorities. Part of their insistence stems from Sunni nationalism. Sunni Arabs have controlled the area that is now Iraq for centuries and hence “have a majoritarian mindset and a conviction that political dominion is their birthright,” writes Fouad Ajami, director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University, in a September 28 Wall Street Journal op-ed. These Sunnis, some of them ex-Baathists or Saddam sympathizers, support a strong, preferably Sunni-led, centralized state.  Still, some experts say the constitution is of small consequence to most average Sunni voters, many of whom have not even read the document, despite efforts by the United Nations to distribute some 5 million copies around Iraq; a recent UN-sponsored poll found that 77 percent of Iraqis had never seen the constitution. “I think for most Iraqis it’s not a big issue,” says Judith Yaphe, senior fellow at the National Defense University. “The big issues are water, electricity, and security.” How are Sunnis expected to vote?Iraq’s Sunni Arabs are hardly a monolithic group and have failed to reach a consensus on a common strategy for the referendum. Unlike Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis lack a central religious authority or ayatollah to unify their disparate elements. “Tribal politics is the overwhelming interest,” Yaphe says. “Framed by family, clan, and region—a lot of things shape what Sunnis do.” Some have called for a boycott. More moderate Sunnis have suggested voting “no.” The thinking among this latter group is that “by boycotting they will shoot themselves in the foot,” Yaphe says, referring to the Sunnis’ ill-advised decision to sit out January’s parliamentary elections. “[T]he provisions they dislike in the current draft, particularly its inclusion of strong de-Baathification measures, are a direct result of their boycott blunder,” writes Noah Feldman, a former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority and current New York University law professor, in an October 9 New York Times Magazine article. Recent news reports suggest the Conference of the People of Iraq, a major Sunni group, along with the Iraqi Islamic Party, will urge its members to vote “yes.” The turnabout by these Sunni leaders came after recent concessions were granted by Shiites and Kurds to allow parliament additional powers to revise the constitution. It’s unclear the Muslim Clerics Association, a highly influential group of Sunni scholars and clerics, or the Iraqi National Dialogue, a coalition of Sunni political parties, will urge its members to vote on October 15. Experts say a small handful of Sunnis, including members of the Sunni-led insurgency, have no interest in participating in Iraq’s political process.Many are former Baathists who are joining the Iraqi security forces and waiting until the political process fails and Iraq becomes further destabilized, says Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service. They will then emerge—perhaps violently—and present themselves as the only solution to the nation’s security problem. Then there are those among the Sunni leadership looking beyond the October 15 referendum at parliamentary elections—scheduled for December 15—as a greater opportunity to improve the political situation for Iraq’s Sunni Arabs. “The emergence of a credible elected Sunni leadership would be a major step forward for Iraqi politics,” Feldman writes, “which have so far been hampered by the absence of anyone who can claim to speak for the ordinary Sunni and deliver those insurgent leaders who may be inclined to compromise.”

James M. Lindsay, the Council’s director of studies, says Iraq “has consumed the Bush foreign policy agenda,” and as a result, “for the administration, it’s important that [the October 15 constitutional referendum] goes well and that the Sunnis rally to the new constitution.” If it does not go well, he says, “and the insurgency continues, it’s unclear how long the administration will be able to sustain its policy on Iraq.” Comparing the Vietnam War with the war in Iraq, Lindsay says there is one overarching difference: “It was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq, it’s a very different issue. It’s a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil, and it is a very real possibility—small, but nonetheless real—that we can see a wider war within that region that would do no one any good.” Lindsay, who is a Council vice president and holds the Maurice R. Greenberg chair, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 11, 2005. It’s now almost a year since President Bush was reelected and the key foreign policy issue seems unchanged: Iraq. He’s been down in the polls on Iraq for over a year now. There’s another major vote coming up there this weekend on the ratification of a constitution. Is Iraq dominatingthe administration’s foreign policy? Iraq is clearly the issue that has consumed the Bush foreign policy agenda. If you were to go back to the heady days of May 2003, just weeks after organized fighting had stopped, the expectation was that we were going to get out of Iraq fairly quickly with an impressive military and political victory. That quick exit has not happened; the death toll of American soldiers in Iraq is now nearing 2,000; the administration has hitched its fortunes on the outcome of the Iraqi constitutional process and, as we have seen, there are great divisions in Iraq among the various sectarian groups over the wisdom of the constitution. For the administration, it’s important that this vote goes well and that the Sunnis rally to the new constitution. If that does not happen and the insurgency continues, it’s unclear how long the administration will be able to sustain its policy on Iraq. Do you now see an analogy between President Lyndon Johnson’s administration and its policy on Vietnam and the Bush administration’s policy on Iraq? In other words, both of them started out with great popular support, but toward the end of the Johnson administration, of course, they were desperate to get negotiations going with the Vietnamese, which they did finally—but it probably helped propel Richard Nixon to the White House. Is it an analogous situation? I don’t sense that the public is as opposed to Iraq today as it was toward the Vietnam War in 1968. One can always draw analogies between historical events, and here there are some parallels. The most obvious one being the confidence that the application of an American force would make a difference and the slow and dawning realization that it’s a much harder issue than anyone had anticipated. There are also some differences: Johnson had never been an enthusiast about Vietnam as President George Bush is about Iraq. The bigger issue for this administration going forward is to try to sustain political support in the near term because here is where Vietnam and Iraq are different: It was always hard to sustain the argument that if the United States withdrew from Vietnam there would be immense geopolitical consequences. As we look at Iraq, it’s a very different issue. It’s a country in one of the most volatile parts of the world, which has a very precious resource that modern economies rely on, namely oil, and it is a very real possibility—small, but nonetheless real—that we can see a wider war within that region that would do no one any good. Do you think the policy of staying in Iraq is really the only viable one right now? None of the policy options are terribly attractive and that’s the great difficulty in Iraq. Ultimately, the American soldiers are going to have to come home; the key trick is to figure out a way to do so in an orderly fashion that leaves Iraq in reasonable shape. But no one has any magic solutions for this. It’s clearly a matter of debate within the administration, within the broader policy elite, of how you can withdraw American troops without bringing about the more horrific outcome that we all hope to avoid. In the president’s last major speech on Iraq he linked it very closely to terrorism again, and said the war on Iraq is against terrorism—trying to bring in memories of 9/11 and so forth. Is that still a legitimate argument in the American public’s mind or are they tired of that? If you judge by the polls, most Americans have moved to the position that Iraq is not helping us in the war on terrorism. I think when the history of Iraq, or the American involvement in Iraq, is ultimately written there’ll be a great irony which is that Iraq had essentially nothing to do with the war on terrorism when it began. It became all about the war on terrorism at the end. Because we clearly do see jihadists flocking to Iraq to fight American troops—the insurgency is still mostly driven by indigenous Sunni forces—but ultimately, the jihadists are getting hands-on training in the art of urban warfare. And, at the end of the day, many of those jihadists are going to leave Iraq and we can only hope they don’t end up here in the United States. Now Bush did speak also at the time of his inauguration and in his 2005 State of the Union about the importance of democracy in the Middle East as whole, and on making progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The only progress that seems to have been made on the Israeli-Palestinian front is that the Israelis, on their own, pulled out of Gaza. It doesn’t seem that there was as much U.S. involvement in this process as might have been anticipated when Bush spoke in his State of the Union address. Can you comment on that? The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was a unilateral decision, not a decision that was engineered or brokered by the Bush White House. Going forward in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian process, the room for maneuver that the administration has is actually quite small. Obviously, one of the immediate steps is to see whether or not the Palestinian leadership will be able to put together a semblance of organization or control over Gaza; there are some reasons to be concerned about what has happened in Gaza over recent weeks, but only time will tell on that account. Bush did make a trip to Europe soon after his inauguration and it seemed he was seeking to soften relations. There’s now possibly a new chancellor in Germany [Angela Merkel] who, presumably, will be more favorable to the United States, although her hands will be limited by the coalition she’s forced to be in. Anything you can say on the European policy? Has that been important for the administration? On the specific question of Chancellor [Angela] Merkel, she is going to be more open to the United States than her predecessor Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was, but ultimately she’s still going to be constrained by German public opinion, which is deeply skeptical at a minimum toward President Bush’s foreign policy. If we step back a second, it’s clear that the Bush administration’s foreign policy has changed in the second term. There are two important questions. One is, how much of that change is substantive as opposed to rhetorical? The second is, to the extent that policy has changed, is it changed by choice or necessity? On the first point in dealing with Europe, the administration made a calculation early on in the term that it was important to change the tone of the dialogue in speaking with the Europeans. So out went the reference of Belgians as chocolate-makers—parenthetically I’ll add, very good chocolate-makers—and out went the talk of old Europe and new Europe, and there’s been a lot more talk of working with our fellow Europeans. That has not translated into dramatic changes in the substance of our policy with Europe; on a number of fronts we’re still at odds with the Europeans, in particular the case of Iran. We are less far apart than we used to be—although the Europeans are nowhere near adopting a policy on Iran that Washington would like to have. In the second question about whether these changes were made more by choice or by necessity, the answer really is by necessity. Iraq is the issue that has consumed the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda. It has engendered a great deal of resentment in other parts of the world; issues that have nothing to do with Iraq have been infused with anti-American spirit. Even on something as obscure as controlling the Internet, there is now an effort being launched by a number of countries led by Brazil to take control of domain names and other related materials away from the United States and give it to a larger international body. I think the administration, confronted with a lot of pushing back from the rest of the world, is now in a situation where it is trying to focus its attention on the one issue it clearly has to get right for its own sake and for the country’s sake, which is Iraq. It’s willingness to push other countries on other issues has diminished substantially. And North Korea is one you haven’t mentioned yet. On that one, there seems to have been a substantive change in U.S. policy, or do you not agree with that? That’s the $64,000 question. What we have is an agreement to have an agreement. What was notable about the North Korea accord was within days of its signing there was disagreement about what it actually meant. And so I think the jury is still out on that one. It’s easy to make the argument that this represents a dramatic change in the behavior of the administration because it has reached an agreement with the leadership in Pyongyang, which it has been derisive about. By the same token, the agreement doesn’t require the United States to do all that much, so we will ultimately see whether this was a real breakthrough or whether it was a convenient agreement to serve both the interests of Pyongyang and to leave it for Washington to pursue the issue further down the road. Let’s conclude on Iraq because that is a major issue. I think most experts expect the constitution will pass because the Sunnis will not be able to muster enough opposition. If that happens, do you think it’s possible for the politicians in Iraq to put together some compromise or will this widen into a civil war? Nobody knows. We will only find out after the vote. What is going to be crucial for American policy, for the Bush administration, is that once this vote occurs—if it goes as you speculate—is to have a clear set of policies and to try and bring as many Sunni leaders in as possible. Obviously, many Sunnis are deeply upset over the constitutional process—partly upset at themselves because they boycotted the process way back in January, which left them on the outside looking in—but also angry because, from their point of view, the constitution has been written by Kurds and Shiites and it has cemented them in a minority position and gives too much power or autonomy to the north and south. And ultimately it will be up to the Sunni Arabs to see how they respond. They’ll have another election in December for a new government. That will give the Sunnis a chance to change the complexion of the parliament, I suppose, and that could affect the writing of the implementing laws that will be necessary. The optimistic case for Iraq is the one you just pointed out, which is that Sunnis feel like their interests are being neglected and so they do what people who feel like their interests are being neglected in a democracy do: They mobilize, organize, and turn out to vote. But that optimistic scenario depends on people believing that the process is going to solve their problems. If they believe the system is written against them and they can’t win, or they’re intimidated by insurgents into not participating, then you can have a far less optimistic result. I do think that civil war as we normally would understand it is not a likely outcome. It is a possible one, and one of the goals of American foreign policy has to be to try and prevent that outcome. It’s interesting that the latest suicide bombers were against Sunnis. Presumably, the insurgents are now so desperate to prevent Sunnis from voting that they’re hitting their own areas. The bombing you referred to fits in with broader criticisms of the insurgent movement in Iraq. Within the Sunni community many people are becoming increasingly disapproving of the tactics of groups such as [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi’s—most notably we have the interception of the missive from [Ayman al-] Zawahiri, the No. 2 person in al-Qaeda, [to Zarqawi] which is critical of the suicide bombings and the targeting of the Shiites that have been conducted by al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the group headed by Zarqawi. This is one of the more interesting developments worth following; whether one of the consequences of the kinds of policies that jihadists have pursued in Iraq is a schism within the Muslim community and having Muslims turn on the insurgency. Ultimately, if you want to win a war against terrorists, it is crucial to get people who belong to that community the terrorists claim to represent to turn their back on the terrorists. So that’s in many ways an optimistic development.

Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab constitutions, who has spent considerable time studying the draft Iraqi constitution, says that even though he would have hoped that the constitutional referendum on October 15 would be rejected, it now looks as if "passage of the constitution is extremely likely."Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says the planned election for a new parliament at the end of the year is of almost as much interest as the constitution, assuming the document is approved. He says the new parliament "is going to be very much a wild card" with the possibility of more secular leaders playing a moderating role. When asked if the passage of the constitution might cause large-scale fighting, he replied: "I think what we’re seeing is a creeping civil war that is not necessarily starting at one particular point in time or over one particular issue. If accounts from the ground are to be believed, there is already some ethnic cleansing going on in some neighborhoods and some areas within Iraq. I don’t think the constitutional referendum is going to be a particular trigger for making that situation much worse, but it’s not going to make it any better."He was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 6, 2005.The last time we talked, you said you were not very optimistic about political developments in Iraq and you were hoping the October 15 constitutional referendum might be defeated, thereby setting up a new set of negotiations that would be more inclusive for the Sunnis as well as the other parties. Do you think that’s at all possible?It doesn’t look likely right now. What would have to happen to make the constitution fail would be real mobilization of the vote among the Sunnis, among Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement, and perhaps some commitment on the part of the insurgency to let the election go forward. And none of those three things seems to be happening. So, at this point, I think passage of the constitution is extremely likely.Do you think the Sunnis will even vote?They’re certainly talking as if they will or at least a lot of their leaders are talking as if they will. There is some indication that voter registration has gone up but at this point, even those people who were interested in getting Sunnis to vote are probably focusing far more on the December parliamentary elections than on the constitutional referendum.Let’s review the constitution (http://www.iraqigovernment.org/constitution_en.htm) again. What are the main contentious points?Well, there are all sorts of little debates in there, some perhaps not so little. They are about personal status law, about Islam, about human rights and that sort of thing. But the really big central point of contention has to do with federalism, or the division of authority between the central government and the local governments.Could you get into that? Clearly the Kurds have always wanted as much independence as they could secure. The new element here I guess is the Shiite drive in the south to have as big an area under Shiite control as possible.That’s exactly what happened. The Kurdish negotiators went in to try and get certain things out of the constitutional process and they basically got everything they wanted. What they wanted to do was to protect the existing economy for Iraqi Kurdistan which is really operating almost as a semi-independent country. It wasn’t a big surprise that they got their wish, but what also happened was those provisions which are available to Iraqi Kurdistan are open to other areas of the country. People were talking before about asymmetrical federalism in which the arrangements would be different for Kurdistan than for the rest of the country and that’s not what happened. So now, any region that wishes to apply can form a region and there is some indication on the part of some of Iraq’s Shiite leaders that they’re interested in submitting just such an application.So, they would try to create a kind of "Shiastan"?Yes, you could call it that. It wouldn’t be religious in name or in form but what they would do would be to shape provinces that were predominantly largely Shiite and form a single region there and it would be expected by many observers that the government of that region would take on a much stronger religious coloration than would exist in the country as a whole because it wouldn’t be quite so heterogeneous. Now, the Sunnis live mostly in the central part of the country, in Baghdad and north and west of Baghdad. What do they have against a sort of Sunni federal state?Well, I guess there are three things. One is ideological: They do not want to see the division of Iraq with the division of the Arab nation. They are still primarily nationalist in their sentiments-both Iraqi and Arab nationalist. A second problem is that it wouldn’t sort all that out neatly because although there are areas that are predominantly Sunni, it is not the case that there is an easy dividing line between the Sunni and Shiite populations. Sometimes it’s not even clear if there is a deep dividing line among some Iraqi families which are mixed, Sunni and Shiite. And the third problem is that this is a resource-poor area of the country so that the main oil-producing regions would fall in the Kurdish and Shiite regions, and the Sunni region, if it did exist, would be fairly poor.Now, I thought the constitution calls for sharing of resources.It does, and like most other things in the constitution, it does so by talking out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand it says these resources belong to the Iraqi people and that sort of implies a national division of resources. But on the other hand, it says there have been some areas that have been historically discriminated against, by which they probably mean Kurdish regions and the southern regions and for an interim period can or should be redressed. But interim periods can last an awfully long time. Assuming that the constitution is approved, the next step is the election at the end of December of a new parliament. Now, this election, some people think, is probably more important than the referendum vote. Is that right?Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. The referendum vote is pretty important but the results I think are a lot more predictable. It’s either yes or no and it’s almost certainly going to be yes.Well, is it possible that a new government-a new parliament that would be elected at the end of the year-might be more representative and might change some things?Yes, the new parliament is going to be very much a wild card. The current parliament is dominated by two electoral alliances, the Kurdish electoral alliances and a largely, but not exclusively Shiite electoral alliance. And those lines may be redrawn. It is not clear that the current Shiite electoral alliance will be able to hold together in its current form. The Kurdish alliance presumably will but there is some tension between the two main parties there. So we may see some new entrants in the electoral field. The other thing that could happen would be greater Sunni participation so that you could have a much more divided parliament, but a parliament that looks a little bit different from the current makeup. Now, some people have suggested that the party of someone like Ayad Allawi, who was the prime minister in the previous government, might gain more strength because it’s more secular. Do you see much chance of that?It’s hard to read that situation. I mean, he did go into the January elections as the incumbent and with a fairly sophisticated campaign. It doesn’t seem to me that he has more resources than he had last January. So I’m not sure that he’ll necessarily do much better. He and others are trying to organize a more secular and less ethnically based coalition to run in elections. I think rather than winning the elections, the most they could hope to achieve would be to hold the balance in a new assembly. Right now, there is a very, very narrow majority of this Shiite coalition. If they even lose a few seats then all of a sudden they’ve got to look toward a coalition and that’s where I think a centrist or secularist party might be able to have some cards to play.Is this pending referendum largely going to be a disappointment to the U.S. if it approves the constitution?I think it should be, but I don’t think it will be. You think the government will make this a demonstration of democracy in action?I think that’s absolutely going to happen. I mean, one of the Bush administration’s few boosts that it got in Iraq was the January elections. So they’re certainly anxious to replay that. Second, the Americans were extremely invested and involved in this process and even though it didn’t go exactly as they wished, it’s still a constitution that I think has got so many American hands on it, that it would be a disappointment for many to see it fail.What are the main points that the United States would have liked to have seen added to the constitution or subtracted?There were some things that I think the United States would have liked to see: probably stronger human rights protection, probably stronger protection for women’s rights, and I think the religious elements make a few in the United States uncomfortable. But the interesting thing about the American involvement in the process was the farther along it got, the less the United States got involved in matters of substance and the more it focused on simple process-getting everybody to the table and getting it done on time. So, as long as there was a deal that everybody signed off on by the deadline, or reasonably close to the deadline, was deemed vital. That is sacrificing an awful lot on content. I think that was a mistake, and I think that was a mistake especially on the issue of federalism. But as a result, the main American problem with this document has to do much less with the content than with the fact that it is not supported by a broad national consensus. Let’s talk a bit about the role of the insurgents in this whole process. Clearly, the insurgents, at least the extremist part of the insurgents led by Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, are rather ruthless. They’re killing Iraqis everywhere, and they’ve more or less declared a religious war against Shiites. Does this have much resonance in the country? How can this be rectified? It’s very hard for moderate Sunnis to speak out, right?Yes, I mean, there’s no question that some elements of this insurgency are extremely blood-thirsty and almost genocidal in their rhetoric. At the same time, there are other parts of the insurgency that are probably a little more political in their focus and there is some hope that, if not the insurgents themselves, at least their constituency and the environment in which they operate can be pulled back into the system. Obviously, the radicals and people like Zarqawi are trying extremely hard to disrupt that, and I think it’s probably necessary to read their attacks on Shiites as not simply part of an extremist religious ideology, although it is, but they are also an attempt to disrupt this entire process and cause civil war. And in that respect, they are having some success, although some of the Shiite leadership is reacting with remarkable restraint. And assuming the constitution is passed on the fifteenth of October. What do you think will happen in the following days? Do you expect a growing civil war or will people just expect it as a given?I think what we’re seeing is a creeping civil war that is not necessarily starting at one particular point in time or over one particular issue. If accounts from the ground are to be believed, there is already some ethnic cleansing going on in some neighborhoods and some areas within Iraq. I don’t think the constitutional referendum is going to be a particular trigger for making that situation much worse, but it’s not going to make it any better.

As the U.S. military looks to hand over more security responsibilities to Iraqi forces, there is mounting skepticism and debate among experts as to the quality and capability of these troops. How many troops have been trained? How many units are combat-ready? Military officials, speaking on Capitol Hill September 29, revealed that the number of Level 1 Iraqi battalions-those capable of carrying out counterinsurgency operations without Coalition assistance-had dropped from three units to one over the summer. Yet in a Pentagon news conference the following day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed the drop as "irrelevant" and noted that the number of Level 2 units, which are able to lead an offensive with U.S. support, had doubled over the summer.Colonel Peter Mansoor, former commander of the First Brigade of the First Armored Division in Iraq from July 2003 to June 2005 who served in Iraq for thirteen months, says achieving and maintaining a Level 1 readiness level is no easy feat, given the inherent difficulties and dangers of mobilizing such a large army from scratch. "The hardest thing is the logistical aspect," he says, "which requires a lot of expertise, equipment, supplies, and the kind of infrastructure being developed for the Iraqi army, particularly the bases, which were built from the ground up because everything was looted right after the war."In an interview with Lionel Beehner, staff writer for cfr.org, Colonel Mansoor explains his time in Iraq training Iraqi forces, including the advantages of training troops abroad, the role of militias, and the difficulties of diversifying Iraq’s armed forces.How is the training of troops in Iraq going? There seem to be discrepancies over the number of "combat-ready" battalions reportedly in place.I wouldn’t say discrepancies; it’s an issue of, what are the standards that rate each of these battalions, and how well are those standards known by the media? The military treat these standards as cut and dry; they are not softened for the sake of public relations. To be rated at Level I is a very high standard, and U.S. military units that have been around a long time and have been training continuously work very hard to maintain a Level I readiness level. It is not surprising that more Iraqi battalions have not reached the highest readiness level. They’ve only been at this now for a couple years. It’s going to take some time to get up to the top level, but they will get there. The hardest thing is the logistical aspect, which requires a lot of expertise, equipment, supplies, and the kind of infrastructure being developed for the Iraqi army, particularly the bases, which were built from the ground up because everything was looted right after the war.I think, as General David Petraeus [who is charged with training Iraqi security forces] said recently at Princeton, if by this time next year we don’t see a significant increase in the number of units ready at Level 1, we should be more concerned. For now, the training of the new Iraqi army appears to be on track.Explain the breakdown of training between police forces under the Interior Ministry and army forces under the Defense Ministry.The police training is pretty intensive but focused more on individual training and less on unit training because police operate in very small numbers-a couple guys in a squad car, a group of people at a traffic-control point. Insurgents who are attacking police have rocket-propelled grenades, AK-47 assault rifles, and machine guns. So police in Iraq have to have heavier weapons to respond to these assaults. Some commentators say they’re more like light infantry. I wouldn’t go that far, but they are certainly well-armed and on the level of, say, a SWAT team in the United States in terms of equipment, but not necessarily with the same level of training.Explain the vetting process of Iraqi recruits.The vetting has been completely turned over to the Iraqis. We train and equip, and they people the force.How are Iraqis recruited into the army? Are they offered financial incentives?We don’t have to convince Iraqis to show up. Jobs are so scarce in Iraq that they show up in droves. This allows some degree of selectivity in choosing recruits. For instance, in the Ready First Combat Team zone we conducted a literacy test and only took those recruits who could read and write in Arabic. We also gave them a medical examination to ensure they were physically capable of doing the job.Are women allowed in Iraq’s army or police forces? If so, are many signing up?Yes. There are women signing up but not in great numbers. It was quite a sea change for the men to have to work with them and pretty interesting to see the dynamics, given their cultural biases.New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent column that Iraq’s navy is almost all men and all Shiites. How do you diversify Iraq’s armed forces?The issue with Iraqi forces is they are recruited and live near their homes. Some go home every night. You can’t sequester people forever. They have families. A lot of Iraqis are joining because it’s a job. So to take Kurds from the northern part of the country and Sunnis from the central part of the country and say, "Go down to Basra and become a sailor," there’s just not a lot of interest in doing that. So those who live near the ports, where there’s a navy, happen to be Shiites. I don’t think it’s any kind of grand political design but rather a geographical issue.Tell me about the training of Iraqi troops abroad-in Jordan, for instance, there’s a police academy-is this a successful experiment and if so, what are the advantages to training Iraqis abroad?The great advantage is the security is much better. You don’t have to guard the installation to the degree you have to in Iraq. We had a police academy in Baghdad that was constantly attacked. Another advantage is if it’s staffed by foreign officers, they don’t have to come into Iraq and become targets in order to teach. Also, existing facilities can be used that don’t require a lot of renovation or rebuilding, as is the case with many buildings in Iraq.Has the U.S. military been involved with training any of Iraq’s militia groups?The official position is that militias have no place in the future of Iraq. As a sovereign country, the state needs to have a monopoly on power. In reality, however, there are militias. They have gone underground to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the part of the country. For instance, the Badr Corps, which was the armed wing of SCIRI [Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq], turned itself into the Badr Organization in 2003 to connote a political bent, as opposed to being just a military organization. [Radical Shiite cleric] Muqtada al-Sadr formed a militia, which he calls the Mahdi Army, which rose up against the Coalition in April 2004. The Kurdish peshmerga [resistance fighters] has been absorbed into the Iraqi army. So militias do exist, but not overtly because everyone is kind of putting their finger in the air to see which way the political winds will blow and whether a democratic government will succeed.As more and more confidence is placed in the security institutions of the state, then we may have more success in seeing the militias die out. But look at the news and they’re still there, battling each other in Najaf, where Sadr’s army battled the Badr forces. Of course, the Sunnis have a militia. It’s called the insurgency.There have been experiments [by the U.S. military] with taking in militia forces. The marines allowed the creation of a Sunni militia to police Fallujah after the halt of the first offensive against that city in the spring of 2004, but it turned out to be an abject failure. They could never reconcile the desires of the people of Fallujah with the desires of the U.S. coalition. The unit, in essence, couldn’t do what it was supposed to do, in terms of keeping Fallujah free of jihadis and other insurgents who took over the city. More successful was a battalion we created and used in Baghdad-we called it a Special Forces battalion-which took in soldiers from a variety of organizations, so a little bit of Badr, a little bit of Kurdish peshmerga, and others who worked together under the tutelage of U.S. Special Forces advisers. It actually was a very successful experiment but was not adopted as a model on a larger scale.Why wasn’t this model adopted?I think the decision was to create a national army and to do so from the bottom up, start with raw recruits, and go from there. Maybe it was seen as not being able to be adopted on a wider scale because we would have had to acknowledge that militias existed when the official policy was for militias to disband.Which countries are involved with the training of Iraqi forces?Of course, the United States and other Coalition forces, but this is an international effort as well. NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] has a training mission in Iraq, and as I mentioned earlier, there is training ongoing in Jordan as well. This is an area where the international community could help even if they don’t want to get involved in active military operations in Iraq.

Anthony H. Cordesman, a leading expert on political and military affairs in Iraq, says there are probably between 20,000 and 30,000 insurgents in Iraq, and about 10 percent to 12 percent are foreigners. He says the hard-core leaders such as al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi cannot be negotiated with. “You do have to hunt out and either capture or kill the leaders of these movements,” he says, while adding that the so-called “foot-soldiers” could be rehabilitated. He says a successful end to the Iraq war is still “doable,” but he urges patience. “Insurgencies take a long time to resolve. You don’t score quick victories. Nation-building takes a lot of time. The internal dynamics are almost always far more important than what outside countries really do,” he says. “Achieving stability in an ethnic and sectarian country like Iraq that’s deeply divided, where many of these issues have never been resolved, where there are not experienced political parties and often no experienced political leaders, takes time. It doesn’t mean people can’t move toward compromise, it doesn’t mean that everything degenerates into truly violent civil war. This is going to be complex, it isn’t going to be quick, and it had better be right.” Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on October 4, 2005. The insurgency has been going on almost since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. What do we know about the insurgents? How many are there? How many foreigners are there? Much of the problem we face is simply a definitional one. When we talk about insurgents, we’re talking about the core groups that are full-time, fully dedicated. We’re also talking about people who are really almost at the margins of these movements, a kind of foot soldier, who are brought in and recruited to act part-time, people who may be collecting intelligence who are not active in terms of the threat, and people who sympathize with violence and act as hosts or provide sanctuary. Obviously, you get radically different numbers. That’s why when people guess at these things you often get estimates anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents, but no one in the intelligence community has ever defined what those figures actually include. They’ve always been very careful to say, “We really don’t know.” And in any case, its really not clear that the number matters very much, because insurgencies are driven not by total end-strength, but by the political context or structure in which they operate, and by the skill and leadership qualities of these cadres that drive them and give them purpose and planning. Do we know what percentage of these are foreigners like al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of at least part of the insurgency? Well, what we have is a rough estimate, based largely on detentions and on the ability to identify some of the people who are killed. There is a steadily improving sophisticated mix of national intelligence and human intelligence. People put the figure at somewhere between 10 percent and 12 percent. There are a few analysts who put those figures higher, but I don’t know of any intelligence experts who have spoken on background and talked significantly about different figures. The percentage of foreign volunteers may be rising, but that is really not something that’s terribly clear. It may really reflect the fact that it is the foreign infiltrators who are often responsible for the most visible, the most damaging attacks in terms of suicide bombings and other lethal attacks on civilians. What are the goals of this insurgency? This insurgency is unusual since there is no clear Iraqi insurgent leader, is there? That’s certainly the case, and there is no unity in the insurgency. When I talked to some senior officials in Iraq, they said, “You Americans constantly want to have one person in charge and one insurgent movement, and we look at this as if there were something like 250, because even when these movements are coordinating different cells, the cells in different areas may have different goals, different leaders. They may be more tribal than national, and you constantly want to simplify this. We can’t afford to do that; if we did, we would almost certainly lose.” I think you’d find there many American military planners and intelligence analysts who would say something similar, that these are divided groups, that there’s not a hierarchy in any rigid sense, that even in movements like Zarqawi’s it would seem that a number of the cells in regions operate with a high degree of autonomy and independence. When you look even at the sort of hard-line Islamist groups, the largely neo-Salafi [extremists] do have foreign leadership cadres. These are not unified, although they all pay some kind of lip service to al-Qaeda. They don’t really have one leader, but what they do have in common is a belief that their idea of puritanical Sunni Islam is the only just interpretation of Islam, that it should form the basis of the state, that anyone who does not support that belief is either a legitimate target or someone who could be sacrificed in the process of attacks. But in addition, there are certainly people who are more supporters of the Baath Party [Saddam Hussein’s ruling party], and are more secular. There are Sunni Iraqi nationalists who have a more religious orientation. There are people operating out of revenge, people operating out of anger against the United States and the coalition. I think what is really clear, is that many of these people know far more about what they are against than what they would want if they succeeded. Now, Zarqawi said a few months ago they should really have a war against all Shiites and declare a sort of religious war. The Shiites, to my knowledge, haven’t joined the fray; they’ve held back a bit. Zarqawi said that actually within the last month. So we need to understand that neo-Salafi Sunni movements not only do not share Islam’s tolerance for people of the book, which is one of the key features of mainstream Islam, but that they see Shiites and people of any other sect other than the one that they support as people who have misused Islam—if not as apostates, they see them as people who have introduced polytheism into Islam. So, it depends on which group and what they are saying. That’s part of the problem, that these groups have no natural limits on the level of violence they can use because they not only see the coalition, the secular Iraqi government, as an opponent, they see a majority of Iraq’s people as opponents. And so the only answer, then, is to try to destroy this movement? I think that when you talk about [extremist movements] that you have to remember you almost unquestionably cannot negotiate with cadres. You certainly can’t negotiate with true believers or fanatics. If there is some magic way to change their belief structure, we certainly don’t know what it is. And even if we did, it would almost be a matter of trying to persuade individuals one at a time, something that may be theoretically possible once they’re detained, but frankly even then it is impractical. You do have to hunt out and either capture or kill the leaders of these movements. But I think that’s very different from many of their members. The followers can often be young men who really don’t have any of these convictions, who are caught up in the image of striking out against the occupiers, the crusaders, the supporters of Israel, the enemy of Islam, and don’t think beyond that, and certainly don’t share this commitment to violence. They’re not people who have that kind of developed, almost fanatic belief structure. And looking at many of the people who have been interviewed after they’ve been captured and detained, it’s quite clear they were sort of young men who were caught up in a system that was designed to quickly indoctrinate them, throw them forward, and make them almost the tools of the cadres that are really dedicated. These people can and have been persuaded, not all of them, but a significant number. And similarly, it’s quite clear that many Iraqis, even if they are people who are strongly pro-Sunni and have deep religious convictions, do not share this belief that somehow people who are not Arabs, and particularly people who are not Sunni puritans, are somehow not Iraqis. Those people, if they are offered an inclusive government, if they are offered a power structure and economic incentives that gives them real hope and a real future, are probably people who can, over time, be persuaded to end their participation in the insurgency. That gets to the question about the political structure and the constitution. What is your feeling? I see that the American embassy is continuing to try to soften the constitution and make it more palatable to Sunnis. On the other hand, there are stories today suggesting the Shiites and the Kurds were trying to make it impossible for the Sunnis to be able to have a meaningful vote. Well, there is no question that whatever was going to happen, regardless of how the process of government was approached, there was going to be a power struggle. Sunnis were not going to easily give up the control they have had over Iraq since the days of the Ottoman Empire. Kurds were always not only going to seek autonomy bordering on independence, but would want [the oil-rich city of] Kirkuk and at least a significant part of the oil. The Shiites were going to unquestionably want the kind of power that their numbers really justify in democratic terms. Plus, in all frankness, talking to them, they have a sense of revenge and the feeling that this is their time and they have decades to make up for. The constitution is just one way of forcing all of these issues out on the table. And the way the constitution is drafted, it does leave many of them, on the one hand open, and on the other hand it requires the new government to act very quickly. You’ve gone from the option of having a general constitution that didn’t outline these issues; to having a constitution that was actually very specific and largely eliminated political debate; to one where the future role of religion is open, the nature of human rights is open, the role of secular versus religious law is open, the definition of federation and what is a federation is open, control over national money and things like oil income is open. And when you look at it, while people often focus on federalism, the relative power of the national government, provincial governments, and the local governments is also left open. If this vote occurs and the constitution is recorded, it will probably be largely on ethnic and religious grounds, with relatively little actual debate over the provisions. And that immediately will make the election that follows two months later essentially a struggle between ethnic and sectarian groups at the political level. It is difficult to see how they compromise mid-campaign. They don’t then have to define all of these aspects of how the constitution will actually be applied until a new government takes place, and that would be at the end of December and in early January. During all of that time, unfortunately, this won’t just be a political debate, it will be an ongoing battle in terms of an insurgency, and nationalists are going to struggle over all of the issues that I’ve outlined while the religious extremists are going to struggle on a completely different level. I think that we need to understand this is not going to be pretty, it isn’t going to be quick, it may take months to really create the structure of governance once the new government comes, and probably things are going to be severely unsettled through at least mid-2006. Are you satisfied with the U.S. strategy right now? I think the problem we have is that you could outline many different strategies. Anyone could write a new strategy in an op-ed piece, or write one in a short study, or form yet another foreign policy committee, but that doesn’t mean that you can do anything to implement it. The fact is the political process now is essentially an Iraqi process. I think the U.S. embassy has done a good job trying to influence—as much as anyone can—what is actually taking place in this political process. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad is focused on all of the issues that are most divisive and has tried constantly to find compromises that are workable. The practical problem is he can’t force this; all he can do is influence it. And to try to influence something that is this deep and this basic in the middle of an ongoing insurgency is very difficult. Similarly, the U.S. military, I think, now has gotten its act together in providing good training to bring the Iraqi military forces online. It now has to, however, deal with the reality that many of these have an ethnic or sectarian prominence by Shiites or Kurds. It can’t alter the elite security forces all that much, although I think that it’s doing what it can do. The people in Iraqi, I think, have done a good job with the resources they have, of reaching out to the police, but the problem is that the police are really still without the training and the equipment they need. Probably, there are as many police that we don’t train and equip that have tribal, religious, or ethnic backgrounds actually in the field as one’s we’ve trained and equipped. And there are limits to what we can do there. If we have, I think, a major flaw in our strategy, it is a longstanding flaw in the U.S. foreign policy structure. The fact is that virtually anybody who has served in the State Department or overseas knows that USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] has been broken without ever being fixed. And in Iraq, that is compounded by the U.S. defense contracting procedure, by the use of U.S. prime contractors with almost no real area of expertise, particularly in dealing with a command economy, who are not themselves dedicated or involved in war fighting, that have to seek security and profit, who have turned much of what they are doing to actual contractors in the field who are not Iraqi and who often are either corrupt or simply go through the motions. We really need an effective aid structure; we need an effective use of money. In the emergency aid areas, that’s worked out reasonably well, but often even when we move into hostile areas, when we score a victory in a place like Fallujah or Tal Afar, we can’t establish a working aid presence that is efficient. There isn’t an Iraqi police force or Iraqi governance, and we can’t really use aid funds with anything like the effectiveness we need. That part of the strategy is flawed to the point of being broken. So, generally, how do you describe your feeling at this juncture? Is the war against the insurgents doable?It’s certainly doable. There is the old cliché that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. I don’t know if we repeat the past, but we certainly as policymakers tend to forget it. Insurgencies take a long time to resolve. You don’t score quick victories. Nation-building takes a lot of time. The internal dynamics are almost always far more important than what outside countries really do. Achieving stability in an ethnic and sectarian country like Iraq that’s deeply divided, where many of these issues have never been resolved, where there are not experienced political parties and often no experienced political leaders, takes time. It doesn’t mean that people can’t move toward compromise, it doesn’t mean that everything degenerates into truly violent civil war. This is going to be complex, it isn’t going to be quick, and it had better be right. Some insurgencies have taken ten years or so to resolve; I’m thinking of the Philippines at the turn of the last century. The idea that we could have troops out by the end of next year seems rather far-fetched to me if we really want to get this thing done, right? Well, that’s certainly true. The question is not should we be out, but how many troops are we going to need over what time period? If you could reduce troop levels by the end of next year to a level somewhere around 70,000, you’d take a tremendous amount of strain off the U.S. force structure. You’ve already put Iraqi forces into the field. They are not capable of taking the most demanding missions, but about 30 percent of them are capable of performing significant security missions now. Those figures should get steadily better with time. We can shift our role more and more to that of advisers providing heavy fire support, of ensuring there aren’t insurgent concentrations. We can provide intelligence that is at a technical level that Iraqis can’t provide. Then slowly and steadily we should be able to reduce our presence. And if the insurgency lingers at some level that does not mean the United States has to be actively involved in the field indefinitely. But it isn’t going to be something where you can have this kind of exit strategy that is all or nothing. That kind of thinking, whether you are in favor of staying or of immediately leaving, really almost ensures something is going to go badly wrong.

This publication is now archived. IntroductionThe upcoming October 15 constitution referendum will, for the first time in their history, give Iraqis the opportunity to accept or reject a new constitution.The Iraqi government is moving to secure polling places and has pledged to respect the will of the voters and treat allegations of vote tampering seriously.Continuous violence in the country, however, has deterred international organizations from mounting major monitoring missions. The Carter Center, for example, which has monitored dozens of overseas elections,did not observe the January elections and will not monitor the October referendum. There are, however, several prominent organizations assisting and advising monitoring groups within Iraq in the run-up to next week’s vote. They are: The United NationsThe UN Electoral Assistance Division (EAD) is working closely with the International Electoral Commission in Iraq—the government group organizing the elections—by providing technical and planning support for next week’s referendum. About forty-five foreign specialists working for the EAD offered advice and assistance and distributed almost two million kilos of materials, such as ballots, polling boxes, and voter screens. The International Mission for Iraqi Elections (IMIE)The IMIE was established in December 2004 to monitor the electoral process in Iraq. The organization is led by a steering committee of members of independent election commission members and electoral experts from around the world. The IMIE has published an extensive report on the conduct and outcome of the January elections, and it will continue to monitor and assist Iraqis throughout the upcoming elections. National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)The NDI, an non-governmental organization (NGO) linked to the U.S. Democratic Party, which provides practical assistance to civic and political leaders, has several programs in Iraq that aim to strengthen political parties and civil society development. Their election program assists “domestic nonpartisan election monitors” through monitoring training programs and educating voters. They work very closely with the Iraqi Election Information network and trained more than 9,000 monitors for the January 2005 election. Iraqi Election Information Network (EIN)The EIN is a domestic NGO dedicated to promoting democracy, transparency, and free and fair elections. The EIN acted as the domestic umbrella monitor for the January 2005 elections and is dedicated to observing all local, district, parliamentary, and presidential elections. International Republican Institute (IRI)While the IRI—a U.S. NGO that works to promote democratic ideals—will not monitor the elections, the group has tried to improve civic and political rights of Iraqis through public outreach, like political party training seminars and other education programs. Like the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the IRI has party affiliations – in this case,  links with the U.S. Republican Party. (U.S. Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, is chairman of its board of directors). Last month, the IRI conducted a public opinion poll (PowerPoint), which found that a majority of Iraqis planned to vote in the referendum. The Arab Center for Independence of the Judiciary and the Legal Profession (ACIJLP)The Egyptian-based ACIJLP, an NGO that works to promote justice and human rights in the Arab region, has signed on to monitor the referendum. They are one of the few Arab organizations observing the election. Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI)The IECI is the main Iraqi body in charge of preparing and conducting elections in Iraq. The IECI has hired more than 100,000 polling staff across the country to carry out public outreach and awareness leading up to all elections, from local to presidential. According to the IECI, thousands of individual monitors have already been registered to observe the election.

This publication is now archived. IntroductionOn October 15, Iraqis go to the polls to vote in a referendum on the country’s draft constitution. The ballot will feature one question: “Do you approve the draft constitution of Iraq?” If a majority of Iraqis vote yes, or if two-thirds of the registered voters in three or more of Iraq’s eighteen governorates do not vote no, then the constitution will pass into law. The referendum, if it passes, will conclude a turbulent process of political infighting that has revealed the deep schisms between Iraq’s Sunni Arab, Shiite, and Kurdish communities. Much of the wrangling has been over wording on sensitive issues like religion, federalism, and distribution of oil revenues. Sunni Arabs complained about being sidelined during the process and criticized the final draft of the document, which was never formally approved by Iraq’s National Assembly, for failing to address their concerns on federalism. Sunnis generally fear a federalized state will allocate too much power and wealth to Iraq’s oil-rich regions in the north and south. Has the constitution been finalized?In theory, yes. Five million copies of an early version of the draft constitution, after several delays, were distributed to Iraqis in early October along with their ration cards. However, the final text of the document is still a work in progress, says Nathan Brown, senior associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Zalmay Khalilzad , U.S. ambassador to Iraq, is reportedly still in negotiations with Sunni leaders over wording in the draft on Iraqi identity issues and may add addendums to the text before the October 15 referendum. Most of these changes, however, are not substantive, Brown says, but amount merely to “tinkering in symbolic areas or changing preambular language.” Can the constitution, once passed, be amended?Yes. Currently, any amendment must win approval by two-thirds of parliament and the Presidency Council, as well as pass a national referendum. One of the Sunnis’ chief concerns is that the constitutional amendment procedures in place are too lax and may allow the document to be easily amendable in the future by the Shiite majority, Brown says. Who can vote on the referendum?Any Iraqi citizen can vote who’s legally competent, over the age of eighteen, and registered to vote by the mid-September deadline. Of Iraq’s 27 million people, roughly 14.2 million are eligible to vote. Unlike the January 30 elections for the transitional National Assembly, none of the nearly two million eligible Iraqi nationals living outside of Iraq’s borders will be allowed to cast ballots. Is voter turnout expected to be high?It’s unclear. Fewer than 60 percent of all registered voters cast ballots in Iraq’s January elections. But experts expect this referendum’s voter turnout to be higher. Much of the turnout will hinge on whether Sunni Arabs boycott the vote, as they did during January’s election. Sunni Arabs, who comprise roughly 20 percent of Iraq’s population, form the majority in four of Iraq’s eighteen provinces, but they are overwhelmingly the majority in only two: Anbar province, a heavily Sunni area west of Baghdad that stretches to the Syrian border, and Salahuddin, a province north of Baghdad. High registration numbers—as high as 75 percent, Iraqi election officials say—in Anbar and Salahuddin suggest that Sunni Arabs may not boycott the election but will vote against the document. Only 10 percent of eligible Sunni Arabs voted in January’s parliamentary elections. Experts expect a very high voter turnout among Kurds, who got most of what they wished for in the latest draft of the document—concessions on the issue of federalism, ambiguous wording on Iraq’s Arab identity, an expected resettlement of Kirkuk, the oil-rich city some Kurdish leaders call “our Jerusalem.” Shiites, who make up a majority of Iraqis, are also expected to vote in relatively high numbers. Much of their turnout, however, will depend on Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric, who has yet to formally declare his position on the constitution, says Kenneth Katzman, a Middle East specialist with the Congressional Research Service. Aside from Sunni anger over the constitution’s wording, the biggest hindrance to a high voter turnout is security, experts say. Several Sunni-dominated areas, particularly along the Euphrates River valley in towns like Tal Afar or Sadah, were insurgent strongholds until recent sweeps by U.S.-Iraqi forces. The raids were part of U.S.-led efforts to secure these areas to allow Sunni Arabs to vote. However, in areas around the Sunni Triangle northwest of Baghdad, security remains inadequate less than two weeks before the referendum, experts say.   Is the constitution expected to pass?Probably, experts say. Even if Sunni Arabs come out and vote against the document, experts say they would probably not make up the majority in enough provinces to derail the constitution. However, a recent rule change was overturned that would have required two-thirds of registered voters—versus just two-thirds of those who actually cast ballots—to vote “no” on the constitution in three of Iraq’s eighteen governorates for the document to fail. The rule was overturned after a loud protest from Sunni Arabs, who called it a “mockery of democracy,” as well as the United Nations and U.S. government. Given past elections’ low voter turnout in Iraq, if the rule change had stood in place, Brown says it would have made “it impossible for the constitution to fail.” What happens if the constitution passes?Once the votes are tallied, which will likely take a few days, the outcome of the referendum will be announced at a press conference by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq (IECI).  If the referendum passes, the document will be ratified and passed into law. Elections for a permanent government will then be held December 15, and the new government will assume office no later than December 31. What happens if the constitution fails?According to the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL)—the interim constitution passed by Iraqis with U.S. oversight—if the constitution is rejected, the National Assembly must be dissolved and elections for a second transitional National Assembly must be held by December 15. Then the drafting process will start again—“a replay of this year basically,” Katzman says. A second draft must be completed by August 15, 2006, and a second referendum held by October 15, 2006. A six-month extension can be requested, pushing the final deadline for the second draft to February 15, 2007. The TAL does not indicate what should happen if the constitution fails a referendum a second time. Will elections monitors be present?Yes. Six international observer groups have accredited nearly 500 observers for the referendum, down from the 700 observers present during the January 30 election. Among those in Iraq monitoring the upcoming referendum are representatives from Arab nongovernmental organizations and the Arab League—a first for Iraq—as well as U.S.-based election watchdog groups like the National Democratic Institute. All observers must be approved by the IECI’s Board of Commissioners, which extended the monitors’ registration and accreditation deadline until October 10.  What role has the United States played in the constitution-drafting process?The U.S. government has been heavily involved in the process. Some Sunni Arabs and Iraqi experts have complained that Washington put too much stock on meeting deadlines set by the TAL than on incorporating the Sunnis’ demands. The United States, in addition to providing election monitors and securing Sunni-dominant provinces, has also provided constitutional scholars to assist in the drafting of the document and urged Shiites to revise language on religion and federalism, in last-ditch efforts to appease Sunni leaders. The United States has also expressed dissatisfaction with the National Assembly’s recent rule change on what constitutes an actual “voter.”

Much has been made in recent months of Iran’s role in Iraqi politics, particularly in the heavily Shiite southern provinces. Some Sunni Arab leaders have accused Iraq’s Shiite leadership of being directly under the sway of Iran. The Iranians “are interested, they are involved, and they are active. And it’s not helpful,” U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters September 20. Others worry Iran’s influence, at least indirectly, may threaten Iraq’s national—or “Arab”—identity and splinter the country into three separate regions between Iraq’s Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite religious and ethnic groups. After a spate of violence in normally quiet Basra involving Shiite-led militias—many of which have ties to Iran—some experts have called into question Iraq’s growing reliance on these militias for security in the south. Lionel Beehner, staff writer with cfr.org, spoke with Peter Khalil, former director of national security policy with the Coalition Provisional Authority and a Middle East analyst with the Eurasia Group, and Michael Knights, a London-based associate with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, on Iran’s role in Iraq regarding its Shiite leadership, militia groups, Sunni-run insurgency, and national identity. Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal told the Council on Foreign Relations September 20, “We are handing the whole country over to Iran without reason.” Do you agree with him? PETER KHALIL: From the Iranian point of view, quite clearly, I don’t think they would like to see Iraq as a failed, or collapsed, state. Nor do the Iranians want to see the breakup of Iraq, particularly because the disaffected Kurdish minority on the Iranian side of the border would cause a lot of problems if the Kurdish side of Iraq were to split off. But they do want to see Iraq as weak as possible to maximize their influence. So whether you can answer in the positive that “we,” I assume meaning the coalition, is handing over Iraq to Iran, I think that would be a negative. Certainly, though, Iran would like to see a much stronger regional government formed in Iraq’s southern provinces, which would again maximize Iranian influence in the south. MICHAEL KNIGHTS: With some individuals very highly positioned within the Iraqi government, people are upset because of their associations with the Iranian government in the early 1980s [during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War]. What we’re seeing now is the culmination of a long, patient process of Iranian political penetration of Iraq’s society. But U.S. policy hasn’t really affected that. As long as democracy is a defining factor in who controls Iraq in Iraq’s future, Iran’s hand within Iraq will be strengthened [assuming Iraq’s majority Shiites are in]. So in a sense, the only way we can be said to have actually handed the country over to Iran is that we encourage the democratic majority rule. In what ways is Iran meddling in Iraq’s affairs? KHALIL: Well, there are sort of three different levels: Commercially, Iranians have a great deal of influence; they’re buying up a lot of property in many of the southern cities like Basra. As far as the second level, they do have a fair degree of intelligence infiltration in the south. Of course, the porous nature of the Iran-Iraq border, although it has improved in the last year or so, has meant that with hundreds of thousands of religious pilgrims who cross over into Iraq, it makes it very difficult to determine which of those religious pilgrims are actually Iranian agents, for example. And thirdly, Iran has a religious influence over some of the southern clerics in Iraq. The religious side of things is a bit more complicated because while Iran would like to see a Shiite-dominated government, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, even though he is Iranian-born, has different theological position from the Iranians. The school that he comes from—the Hawza School of Quietism, as it’s called—sees a backroom role for clerics and does not necessarily favor clerics or Islamic jurists controlling the executive as they do in Iran, where you have [Ayatollah] Khomeini and the Guardian Council basically running the country. I should note that because Iran wants a weakened Iraq to maximize its influence, this means Iran’s influence tends to be spread across a diverse number of sometimes competing Iraqi actors. There’s some evidence of Iran supporting not just Shiite actors but even members of the Sunni insurgency to try, in some ways, to create some sort of controlled disorder that suits Iran’s interests. There’s a lot of speculation the heavily Shiite southern regions around Basra, under a federalized Iraq, may evolve into an Iranian-style theocracy. KNIGHTS: Looking at the possibility that a provincial regional government could be formed in southern Iraq—either with two or three provinces involving Basra or other rich states or indeed all the predominantly Shiite provinces—if that occurs, then what we are seeing is the development of the worse-case scenario feared right after the 1991 Gulf War. That is, an Iranian-influenced enclave in southern Iraq that would loosen the ties that bind Iraq together. There is a case to be answered that federalism in Iraq will strengthen Iran’s hand. When you’re talking about Basra and what is essentially atrophy of state power in Iraq, the fact is the southern regions, the provinces, and the municipalities are becoming more autonomous every day. And the governance of those areas are increasingly falling to Shiite factions associated either with SCIRI [the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Resistance in Iraq], who are an Iranian property, or Moqtada al-Sadr’s street-level cult of personality, the Mahdi Army. There’s clearly been a serious slippage of central-government control in southern Iraq. Basra is the most serious example of this. Within the Basra government, the British have been hailed for establishing a more favorable security environment and working closely with the local powerbrokers. However, there are now some signs this kind of close relationship with local Islamist leaders, many of them members of SCIRI and its paramilitary wing, the Badr Organization, will have some negative aspects. A number of cities in the south of Iraq offered a considerable amount of local autonomy to unelected actors, including the Badr Organization and Sadr’s Mahdi militia, or local militias associated with it What is Iran’s relationship with the Shiite militias? KHALIL: There’s a long history of this, particularly with SCIRI. Their armed wing, the Badr Corps or the Badr Organization as it’s called, has something like 12,000 Shiite militias, many of whom spent a fair degree of the last ten years in exile in Iran being trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and being paid on the Guard’s payroll. So I think it would be naive to assume those links don’t continue and, of course, there’s a fair degree of evidence of that over the last couple of years. Iran also supports other competing Iraqi actors, other Shiite militias in the south as well. And this problem is one which the British are clearly facing at the moment as far as infiltration of some of these militias into the state security services, who might owe their allegiance to the militia commanders, but also to Iran indirectly. KNIGHTS: I think SCIRI’s involvement with Iran is difficult to characterize in terms of direct assistance and of being part of an Iranian command-and-control network. As usual with Iran, its hand in these affairs is a lot more difficult to describe and prove than we would hope. In many cases, SCIRI owes their physical existence and survival during Saddam’s era to Iranian security services. One thing that I would say is members of SCIRI, and also the Dawa Party in Iraq, which is led by Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, visited Iran during the summer and took over ten ministers from the Iraqi cabinet and visited a number of former associates in Tehran, as well as the tomb of [Iranian revolution leader] Ayatollah [Ruhollah] Khomeini. I think this illustrates some of the very deep, questionable, interpersonal and inter-organizational ties that still exist between the current Shiite ruling block in Iraq and the Iranian security apparatus. What’s the relationship between Iran and Sadr’s group? KHALIL: That’s very complicated. On the surface, Sadr is someone who combines strong Iraqi nationalism with radical Islam and would tend to be one of those Shiite leaders who is not as strongly influenced by Iran as, say, [SCIRI leader] Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, who has that long history with Iran. But there has been evidence that [Sadr’s people] possibly were in contact [with Iran] and got some support from there as well. KNIGHTS: Sadr’s connections to the Iranian security apparatus are even harder to characterize than SCIRI’s or Dawa’s. In some ways, Sadr is a very poor prospect as an Iranian proxy. He’s xenophobic. He’s very disenchanted with Iranian-sponsored exiles who are currently heading up Iraq’s Shiite block, including of course Prime Minister Jaafari and SCIRI. He has recently flexed militarily with SCIRI’s Badr forces, so he’s generally not an ideal proxy for the Iranians to use. One of the characteristics of Iran’s intelligence and security penetration throughout the Middle East is that the Iranians like to keep all their bases covered. They might well retain low-level ties with Sadr and his Mahdi Army; they will, no doubt, also maintain ties to some of the subordinate groups and tribes within Sadr’s network, particularly those operating in Iraq’s southern border provinces. Since the invasion of Iraq, we have had to tear up many of the established truths about terrorism and sectarianism in the Middle East. The first is the fact that Islamists and Baathists won’t work together. Equally important is the notion that Sunni and Shiite militants will not work together. Zarqawi, known for his antipathy toward the Shiites, has utilized Shiite militants to undertake a number of bombings in the south. And therefore it should not be surprising that it works vice-versa also. Now, Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus has quite a long history of working with Sunni militants. Is there any evidence Iran is abetting the insurgency, particularly the foreign jihadis? KHALIL: There have been limited examples of this. There is some evidence of Iranian intelligence being involved with Sunni insurgents. Most of it is circumstantial evidence coming out of press reports. Obviously, there’s a real sectarian problem with supporting [Al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu al-] Zarqawi and other Sunni fundamentalists. I think what Iranin support does fall into is the broader Iranian objective to create a degree of disorder in Iraq, but not so much that it will completely collapse the country. KNIGHTS: Iran is not working directly with the foreign jihadis or Zarqawi’s networks. Instead, I would agree that Iran is working indirectly to undermine the U.S. occupation of Iraq by making available certain difficult-to-access components for the construction of improvised explosive devices. Recently, we’ve heard a lot about passive infrared triggers going into Iraq from Iran. It might very well be that these kinds of components are being sent into Iraq and then being placed on the black market where, of course, they can then be bought by either Shiite or Sunni insurgent factions. Is Iran involved in the latest spate of violence in the southern region and Basra? KHALIL: I don’t think we can overstate Iran’s participation in this, because while I said earlier that Iran would like to see Iraq as weak as possible, I think it’s against their interest to see Iraq collapse entirely, where you have a complete splitting off into three separate groups for example. So it’s a bit of a balancing act. Certainly the current spate of violence is more about different Iraqi Shiite religious militia jockeying for position in the south, jockeying for positions of power, trying to control the provincial councils but also trying to get a foot in the door of the state security services to try to control different areas. And it involves competing interests of Sadr’s Mahdi Army with Hezbollah in Iraq, which is another Shiite militia in Iraq, also Dawa and the Badr Organization. KNIGHTS: I would say Iran is only one of many actors involved in the recent spate of violence in southern Iraq. I think the situation there is so complex, but I think we’re in danger of grossly overestimating Iran’s ability to control directly the insurgency in southern Iraq. I think, much like the coalition, Iranian security forces swim in a confusing sea of political factions and sectarian decisions. In many ways, they have some advantages over the coalition. They’ve been involved in southern Iraq for nearly two decades; they have much better insight into the mentality and tribal structure of southern Iraq; and they were probably much more ready for the post-war recovery phase than we were in the multinational coalition. Now, having said that, they are still, nonetheless, an external faction who will receive varying levels of support from local proxies, depending on whether or not those proxies see benefit in cooperating with the Iranians. There are no simple relationships here; nobody is functioning as a brainless automaton under Iranian control. Iranians have to vie for influence against the coalition and against internal competitors on a day-by-day basis. Does Iran have interests in the south outside of its religious ties to the region?Perhaps economic interests? KHALIL: Absolutely. This is tied to the fact that oil production in Iraq, of the 1.6 or 1.7 million barrels a day that are exported out of Iraq, 1.4 or 1.5 million come out of the southern oil fields. So the south has a great deal of economic importance and I suspect the call for a regional autonomous state in the south—of up to nine provinces out of a total of eighteen in Iraq—would definitely suit Iranian interests so long as it remains within a broader, albeit weak, federal structure. Some of Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors who rely on Iraq for oil are concerned by Iran’s increasing influence. Are their fears justified? KHALIL: There’s a general fear among Sunni Arabs—Iraqis as well as Sunni Arabs across the region—about this growing threat of a “Shiite crescent” across the Middle East [stretching from Iran to Lebanon]. While there’s some truth to the fact that different Shiite groups have made great advances in political freedoms and political power—not just in Iraq with the Shiite-dominated government, but also with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and so on—I think it’s a bit premature to talk about a Shiite crescent. If you look at a map of the region, most of the Shiites live right on top of some of the richest oil fields in the Middle East. There’s a saying that God favored the Shiites with oil. The fear now is that they are going to correlate that with political power. When you talk about Iraqi identity, which always comes up whenever anyone mentions Iran’s influence, would you say Iraqis, particularly in the south, consider themselves as Iraqis before they consider themselves Shiites? KHALIL: There’s a lot of evidence to suggest there’s a complicated list of ethnic, sectarian, and political groups in Iraq that cross over. For example, you can have secular Shiites that more in line with the Kurds, such as [former interim Prime Minister Ayad] Allawi. But having said that, there is this overlay of Iraqi nationalism as well, which the Shiites are part of, and in fact, Sadr’s group epitomizes this to some extent, even though they’re connected to a very strong Islamic radicalism. And Shiite Arabs do distinguish themselves from their Persian, sectarian brethren if you like. The question is, though: Has the religious identification become more powerful than some of these ethnic identifications? The strong Shiite secular movements in the 1950s and 60s in Iraq in the leftwing-type political groups—the Communist Party, trade unions, and so forth—was really crushed by the Baathist regime throughout the seventies and eighties and really what was left, as far as identification, was very tribal, was very family-oriented, and religious. And these are the identifications that survived. So it’s certainly true there’s been a shift in the way Shiite Arabs may see themselves. They might be more strongly connected to other Shiites, regardless of ethnicity. KNIGHTS: I think they would consider themselves Shiites first. It would be wrong to underestimate the depth and breadth of pan-Shiite ties between Shiite unities in Iran, Iraq, and other areas in the Gulf and Levant. Since the fall of Saddam, we have seen the Iran-Iraq border separating the two countries begin to disintegrate. Economic, demographic, and theological integration is moving ahead very rapidly. This is one of the factors increasing Iranian influence in Iraq, and it’s a perfectly legitimate process of integration between two countries: Two Shiite communities have more in common than they have separating them. Just how dangerous is Iran with respects to its involvement in Iraq? Are some people making much ado about nothing? KNIGHTS: In terms of dangers, I would just say the new government in Iran [under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is a very confident, rash, and militaristic regime. There is every indication that it believes it is the first true Islamic government since 1979, and furthermore, that the Ahmadinejad faction believes that a Shiite-controlled Iraq has the potential to be the second true Islamic state.

Top U.S. military commanders in Iraq have called recent efforts to sweep insurgent strongholds in Tal Afar and elsewhere “great successes.” But some insurgency experts dispute that claim, arguing that the insurgency is surging and that large swathes of Iraqi territory still do not remain under U.S. or Iraqi government control. August was the third-most violent month in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, while the number of U.S. forces killed has eclipsed 1,900. William L. Nash, a retired U.S. Army major general and former administrator for the United Nations (UN) in post-war Kosovo, says the military operations in Iraq should not come at the expense of political development and economic investment. “You do not win an insurgency through guns,” he says. “You win an insurgency through politics and economics and social equality.” Nash, the General John W. Vessey senior fellow for conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations and director of the Council’s Center for Preventive Action , offers recommendations for undermining the insurgency, rebuilding Iraq, and eventually removing U.S. forces. Is the U.S. strategy of sweeping cities that serve as bases for insurgents working? I think it’s very important to understand that large operations such as the ones the military has conducted recently in Fallujah, Ramadi, Tal Afar, and the like, are but part of a strategy. If you deal with [this plan] in isolation, you can bring up all sorts of questions on their viability, sustainability, and the wisdom of doing it, in general. But if you look at it another way—that this is only part of what the United States is trying to do in Iraq to achieve its goals, and it’s got to be combined with economic investment, political development, etc., as well as efforts to sustain the security environment—then, as part of a whole, it makes more sense. What do you mean specifically by ‘political development’ and ‘economic investment’? The key issue with respect to political development is the fact that the citizens of Iraq feel they have no direct influence on the governance of their country and their lives. As you develop a political system that is, in fact, representative of the people, and they come to believe the government is a servant of the people, then they invest in that, buy that, and choose that over the alternative, which would be chaos, a repressive regime, or a sectarian environment that is debilitating with respect to individual capacities, either with respect to your lifestyle or your pursuit of economic gain. With respect to economic development, the issue is whether people have the wherewithal and opportunity to go about creating better lives for themselves and their family. Are there opportunities for entrepreneurial programs that allow folks to be successful businessmen on a big or small scale and provide for their families, both now and in the future? So your assessment is the U.S. military strategy is not being backed up by a successful economic and political strategy? Right. It’s been very clear since day one—when the statue [of Saddam] fell, if you will, on April 9, 2003—that there has been a great deal of difficulty, primarily from lack of planning or poor preparation for the consequences of victory. [Because of this,] the true circumstances of the country after the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime gave opportunity for those who oppose what we advocate and support to present an alternative and create circumstances that make the achievement of democracy, market economy, and rule of law, very, very difficult to occur. You mentioned earlier efforts must be made “to sustain the security environment.” How do you do this? With more troops? It’s a more holistic plan. You can’t wait for sustainment if there’s a bad guy operating someplace. Certain circumstances may require you to go and act. But it will also probably mean you’ll have to go and act later if you are not able to sustain a secure environment, not so much through not having enough coalition forces, but through the establishment of Iraqi-based security in an area. Andrew Krepinevich, a military historian, calls the U.S. military’s sweeps of insurgent strongholds a “whack-a-mole” strategy, where insurgents are scattered and then caught when they reappear in other strongholds. Krepinevich says this strategy will not work long-term. He would argue, if I interpret him correctly, you need to focus on places where you can sustain the operation and create these oil spots, or ink spots, that gradually, over time, expand. In general, experts seem to agree with this “oil spot” strategy. So why doesn’t the U.S. military implement it? Well, the fact of the matter is they are implementing it, or they’re trying to implement it. If you go to the southeastern part of the country, you’ll find a lot of oil spots, if you will, that are relatively peaceful. But those are largely Shiite, ethnically homogenous areas. Right. As a theory, it’s very sound, but the fact of the matter is it takes longer to get the ability to stabilize or sustain. Now you can talk about time wasted, the appropriate strategy, and the fact that we didn’t have enough forces in the beginning, etc., but we are where we are. And where we are is that the number of American forces is going to remain the same or be reduced next year. And it’s essential that the Iraqi forces expand and improve; not only the military, but more importantly, the police. We don’t want a military state. We want the police as a civilian-based element and base of public security. The U.S. military has hailed the recent sweep of Tal Afar a success because of the high number of insurgents killed or captured. But given the violence that followed, in Baghdad and elsewhere, would you agree with this assessment? The sweep was a success, as far as the sweep went. But the enemy is not going to sit back. War is about action and counteraction and the dynamics of dealing with an enemy that is working very hard to combat what we’re trying to accomplish. So the point is, the enemy reacted to our advance and counterattacked. Like all insurgencies, they attacked where we’re weak and tried to avoid where we’re strong. But why are we weak in Baghdad? Going back to the oil-spot analogy, shouldn’t we have secured Baghdad by now? It’s not that we’re weak in Baghdad. But we haven’t even been able to fully secure the road to the airport. The fact of the matter is Baghdad is a big place. We’re faced with the need to defend everywhere. They have the option of picking the time and character of their attacks. There are very low resource requirements to conduct a suicide bombing, and they’re not easy to disrupt. Does the United States have enough intelligence on the ground? The United States will never have enough intelligence. There are Iraqi people who watch the road all day long from downtown to the airport. It’s the Iraqi people, the Iraqi police, and the Iraqi governing structure that have to establish the conditions where people say, “No, we don’t do that.” The fact of the matter is that that capacity is developing. Second, it will never be what we want it to be until there is a political buy-in by the citizens of Iraq that this government, created by a constitution, is responsible for and responsive to all citizens. Give me one specific example of something the U.S. military is going right. Ninety-five percent of what the American military is doing is right. The total cock-up on this thing has been the failure to establish the political and economic spheres, the inefficiencies that took place with respect to the post-conflict reconstruction efforts. You do not win an insurgency through guns. You win an insurgency through politics and economics and social equality. If the constitution passes in the October 15 national referendum and the political process moves forward, do you expect this to have a calming effect on the insurgency? The issue is that the battle that’s taking place is for the minds of the Iraqis with respect to what part of Iraq they identify with. One of the problems is that the mere presence of Americans is disruptive to this development process. There are some of us who argue that the removal of American forces would have a more positive effect on the insurgency, which would be intuitive from the force ratios. But the force ratios are not what are important. What are important are political and economic development and the identity of the Iraqi people with their own future. What’s your timetable for a complete pullout of U.S. troops out of Iraq? I have no idea when we will completely pull out of Iraq. I think by the midterm elections [for U.S. Congress] of next year there will be a sizeable decrease, but that will be a political, not necessarily a circumstance-based, process.

This publication is now archived. IntroductionBack in July, John Burns of the New York Times posed a provocative question: If there’s civil war in Iraq, how will we know it? The answer may be unclear, but the question holds particular relevance after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose al-Qaeda in Iraq claimed credit for a string of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad, called on September 14 for an “all-out war against [Shiites], whereever they are in Iraq.” Lionel Beehner,staff writer for cfr.org, asked several experts their opinions of what constitutes a civil war, and whether the situation in Iraq qualifies or not. Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow of foreign-policy studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the Iraq Index:The kind of civil war I’m worried about is of the ethnic-cleansing kind, where people form militias and clear out neighborhoods. Nothing close to this kind of situation is happening in Iraq now. People are trying to spark it, but it’s not really happening. Also, look at the top political leaders. With the exception of a few Sunnis, I see no other leaders encouraging civil war. I also think the nature of the recent casualties is quite similar to what it’s been all along. It’s a little more targeted toward one type of ethnic group versus the randomness before, but that seems more in the spirit of attempted provocation. If you saw the militia-style combats—clearing out neighborhoods, people fighting each other and getting killed in pitched gun battles versus car bombs, or leaders calling for more organized conflict—then that would constitute a civil war. Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service: Civil war is organized violence designed to change the political structure or governance within a country, or internal conflict within a state. For example, Nicaragua’s contras [back in the 1980s] were conducting a civil war. In the Middle East, in this context, it’s taken to mean war between ethnicities. But any insurgency against a government is, in my definition, a form of civil war. This week it’s definitely become clearer that we’ve entered civil war, but whether it’s a sustained or permanent feature, we don’t know. Also, I wouldn’t say it’s full-blown, that is, where it’s neighborhood against neighborhood. We have seen a low-level Shiite reaction using militias, not full-blown reprisals, but I don’t think you need that to meet the definition; just because you don’t have one side fighting back doesn’t mean you’re not in a civil war.  Marina Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy and Rule of Law Project:To go from acts of terrorism to civil war you need two population groups deliberately targeting each other. As long as it is insurgents trying to kill people to dissemminate terror, and the population is angry at the terrorists, that does not constitute civil war. In the case of Iraq, we would talk of civil war if the insurgents, who are overwhelmingly Sunni, started to deliberately target Shiites (or Kurds) and the targeted group reacted by holding every Sunni responsible, and thus would seek revenge against all Sunnis. I’m very hesitant to say you have a civil war in Iraq now. There’s no evidence, for example, the Sunni insurgents are deliberately targeting Kurds. But I’m beginning to see elements of a civil war. No doubt the insurgents are targeting Shiites, and there were also some reports after these last few bombings [in Baghdad] that Shiite militias have been deployed along with the Iraqi army, which, while understandable under the circumstances, would indicate the beginning of a situation toward civil war. We saw this happening in South Africa between 1990-94, where there were lots of attacks in townships by groups of Zulus, who were immigrant mine workers housed in Johannesburg’s hostels. These attacks were politically rather than ethnically motivated and the mine workers became essentially the arm of the army. But what happened after these attacks is the population of these townships, ethnically mixed but not predominantly Zulu, started seeing not just the armed groups as the enemy but anyone who belonged to that same ethnicity. Fortunately, progress toward a negotiated settlement in South Africa halted the cycle of attacks before the country could sink into a full-blown civil war. I think Iraq is sliding very closely in that direction. It’s not quite there yet, but there is no longer a viable political process underway to halt the slide into civil war. David Phillips, senior fellow and deputy director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive Action:It’s already civil war. Civil war is sectarian-based conflict that’s systematic and coordinated. This has been going on for some time [in Iraq]. I’d say the bombing in Najaf in the months after Saddam’s statue was toppled [in April, 2003] was the opening salvo. There are many levels of intensity to civil conflict, but when you look at the steady drip of casualties [in Iraq] and the effect that has on the psyches of Iraqis, I think that qualifies as civil war. Zarqawi’s assertion this week [calling for sectarian violence] just confirms what we’ve seen going on all along. Next, what happens is the political process breaks down and sectarian strife worsens, Iraqi Kurds withdraw their cooperation from the government, ethnic conflict ensues, and Iraq starts to fragment. This will force the United States to manage the deconstruction of Iraq, meaning the country is not viable, and the United States can’t have 140,000 troops in the middle of a civil war. We’ll have to withdraw troops to the north, draw a line in the thirty-sixth parallel [which formerly demarcated the largely Kurdish no-fly zone from the rest of Iraq], and secure U.S. national interests, in the form of Kirkuk’s oil fields and protecting democracy in northern Iraq. Thomas X. Hammes, a former Marine colonel who served in Iraq in early 2004: I think you know it when you see it, but we’re not there yet. In a true civil war, the mass of society on both sides is involved. Civil war would require family-on-family violence. That’s not the case yet. Remember, many of the Sunni tribes still have Shiite branches. Obviously, all sides are preparing for the possibility [of civil war], but I think as long as [Shiites and Sunnis] are talking and trying to work through the constitution, we’re OK. Remember, it took [the United States] six years to write the Articles of Confederation and even those were flawed. These things take time, and this an area that has never been exposed to democracy before. Zarqawi seems to be trying to incite civil war. There are also indications he’s getting more Iraqis to help out and no longer solely relying on foreigners. It’s a terrorist campaign that’s trying to instigate civil war, but it’s not working: The [Shiite] militias haven’t come out in a big way because [Shiite spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali] Sistani and [radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-] Sadr are trying to keep the violence tamped down. Neither of them wants a civil war. I think the Shiites understand that if they just stay with the democratic process, they will end up running Iraq. So why should they get into a civil war to get what they already got peacefully? Of course, the Sunnis have run the place for 500 years, so they have this arrogance that they’re the only people who can run it. Steven Metz, director of research at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute: It’s really a whole spectrum because when we hear the phrase “civil war,” we think of the equivilance of total war. But I think there are lots of things at lower levels that constitute civil war. In terms of its definition, it’s obviously just war primarily internal to a country, even though it could have some external involvement. I’ve said all along the chances are perhaps fifty-fifty that the ultimate outcome [in Iraq] will be some sort of major civil war. I haven’t seen anything politically or militarily that would lead me to change that position. The bottom line is Iraqis don’t have a strong sense of national identity but rather a sense of tribal and local identities. Countries like that are only able to avoid internal conflict if they have a powerful, central government, like Iraq had under Saddam Hussein. Unfortunately, a democracy is not the type of government equipped to hold together such a fractured society. I think if we want to conceptualize Iraq, we should look at what’s taken place in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa the past fifty years, where you had similary fractured states, and only those with strong, central authorities were mainly able to pull it together. The question in Iraq is if they’ll have this strong, central leader. Because of the repressive and parasitic nature of Hussein’s rule, there are no candidates. Anyone who had a base of followers or was charismatic [during the former regime] either ended up dead or so far removed from the country—like Ahmed Chalabi—they simply don’t have the base to do it. List of Experts:Michael O’Hanlon, Brookings Institution; Brookings IndexKenneth Katzman, Congressional Research ServiceMarina Ottaway, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy and Rule of Law ProjectDavid Phillips, Council on Foreign Relations’ Center for Preventive ActionThomas X. Hammes, U.S. Marine CorpsSteven Metz, U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute

This publication is now archived. What is the status of Iraq’s insurgency? Despite some political progress, Iraq’s insurgency shows few signs of waning, experts say. The most recent attack—a series of explosions in Baghdad that began with a suicide car bomb and left at least 152 dead and hundreds wounded—marks the worst day of violence in the capital since March 4, 2004, when coordinated suicide bombs outside Shiite mosques killed 181 and wounded 573. Over the past few months, the number of attacks by insurgents, on average, has held steady at around seventy per day, down from their peak of nearly 150 per day just before the January 30 elections but still slightly higher than during the relative calm that followed the election, when attacks averaged around forty per day. Car bombs and suicide attacks also remain high.With important political milestones ahead—including an October 15 referendum on Iraq’s constitution and parliamentary elections slated for December—some experts expect an upturn in violence in the coming months. “ Certainly the pattern the past two years has always been for the insurgency to increase its attacks during these critical milestones,” says Peter Khalil, former director of national-security policy for the Coalition Provisional Authority. The U.S. military, along with Iraqi security forces, have stepped up their efforts to drive the insurgents from strongholds such as Tal Afar, where nearly 400 rebels were arrested in a recent sweep. If the new constitution passes, is it likely to quell the insurgency?Probably not, experts say. “Under any circumstance, the core element of the insurgency will continue,” says Jeffrey White, Berrie defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “[The constitution] may weaken their hold on Sunnis, but the insurgency is embedded in the Sunni community, and entrenched elements will continue to fight.” A lot also depends on the Sunni voter turnout in October’s referendum on the constitution, White says. “If large numbers of Sunnis come out and vote in large numbers, and vote yes, then that’s a signal there are lots of Sunnis ready to join the political transformation process legitimately.” What appears to be driving the Iraqi insurgency?More than two years after the inception of the insurgency, experts remain divided on what the principal force is fueling it. Experts agree the insurgency comprises two main groups of fighters—former Baathists and foreign jihadis—united by their desire to disrupt the political process and drive U.S. forces out of Iraq. But within the insurgency are various ethnic and ideological strands driven by their own unique motivations. What are some of these motivations?Iraq specialists and counterinsurgency scholars have floated a variety of theories about the goals galvanizing the various insurgent groups. Among them:A return to Baathist rule. Experts say hard-line loyalists of Saddam Hussein, including former high-ranking military or intelligence officers of the Baath Party, may be seeking to regain power through a so-called “third coup.” In 1963 and 1968, Baathists came to power in Iraq by taking control of the Iraqi military and seizing political power. The Baathists now fighting in the insurgency are a powerful group, well-funded and stocked with military officers trained during Saddam Hussein’s regime in conventional urban warfare. But even Baathists not directly involved in the fighting have some experts worried. “The Baath Party strategy has always been to get control of the security forces,” says Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst for the Congressional Research Service. Katzman theorizes that some former Baathists joining the Iraqi security forces are waiting until the political process fails and Iraq becomes further destabilized. They will then emerge—perhaps violently—and present themselves as the only solution to the nation’s security problem. Establishment of Islamic rule. This appears to be the goal of foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Yemen, and other Arab countries, experts say. By sowing chaos, these Islamist militants hope to force U.S. forces out of Iraq and create a fertile recruiting ground, not unlike Afghanistan in the 1990s, from which to train and recruit jihadis. Their ultimate purpose is to restore an Islamic caliphate, a theocracy based on Islamic law that for twelve centuries spanned the Muslim world. “They’re thinking decades in advance, and they see Iraq as the first nation in the set of dominos,” says Thomas M. Sanderson, deputy director of the Transnational Threats Initiative at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. These jihadis are coming into Iraq from throughout the region, but the majority hail from Saudi Arabia. Once in Iraq, some foreign fighters join the terror network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Pentagon officials say foreign jihadis, though comprising only 10 percent of the insurgency, carry out most of the suicide bombings targeting Iraqi civilians. Nationalism. “It’s the strongest force [in insurgencies],” said Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a May 14 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, citing the success of the North Vietnamese and other insurgent movements. Nationalism is also what motivates some of Iraq’s insurgents, many experts say. These include Iraqis who, after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell, were fired from their military or other government jobs but do not favor a return to Saddam Hussein’s secular form of Arab socialism. Most of these nationalists are Sunnis who fear a Shiite-led government, support a strong state run by Sunnis, and want U.S. forces out of Iraq quickly. Some experts say these fighters are less likely to target Iraqi civilians or engage in suicide bombings. What other factors explain the insurgency?Organized crime. News reports suggest a rise in insurgent attacks related to organized criminal activity. Bruce Hoffman, an insurgency expert at the RAND Corporation, says the kidnapping of civilians has been common in postwar Iraq, but “we only notice it more now because they’ve been kidnapping foreigners.” These attackers are motivated more by greed than politics. Some are leftovers from the 100,000 to 200,000 prisoners Saddam Hussein released before the U.S. invasion. Others are what Steven Metz, director of research at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, calls “casual insurgents”: out-of-work Iraqis drawn to crime because it pays. Detonating an improvised explosive device can pay $100 to $200, Metz says; killing an American can pay upwards of $1,000. There are around twenty criminal gangs operating in Iraq, according to a recent report by Olive Security, a British security-consulting firm. Many of them kidnap high-level Iraqi officials or foreigners and then sell hostages to the highest bidder, experts say; other kidnappings are subcontracted out by militant groups. Tribal feuds. Prominent throughout Iraq’s rural regions and the so-called Sunni triangle, extended families and clans command strong loyalty and are a common source of group identity among Iraqis. It’s unclear how much of the recent surge in violence stems from tribal leaders, but as Metz points out: “Local elites recognize that in a secular, modernized Iraq, their power would be challenged.” Revenge. Some Iraqi civilians join or collaborate with the insurgency for more personal reasons: they can’t feed their families or they lost loved ones during the war. “There’s a need to prove their manhood,” Metz says. “One can’t overemphasize factors like honor and justice in this culture.” These civilians may take up arms because they are fed up with the U.S.-backed government’s inability to provide basic staples like security, running water, or electricity.Collusion by neighboring countries. Many of the countries on Iraq’s borders— Iran and Syria in particular—are believed to be indirectly abetting the insurgency, experts say. The United States and Iraq accuse Syria of not doing enough to prevent foreign jihadis from crossing its 380-mile porous border with Iraq. On September 12, speaking to reporters, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad accused Syria of allowing al-Qaeda-style training camps to operate within its borders. There’s also growing unease in the region over the role of Iran among Iraq’s Shiite ruling majority. Tehran’s primary concern, according to a March report by the International Crisis Group, is “to prevent Iraq from re-emerging as a threat, whether of a military, political, or ideological nature.” Some Middle Eastern countries may be provoking a degree of instability in Iraq because they do not want a democracy on their doorsteps, many experts say. More importantly, these states may not want to see Washington succeed in its experiment to remake the Middle East to its liking. What is the U.S. military’s counterinsurgency strategy?According to June 23 Senate testimony by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. strategy has shifted “from conducting security operations to a heavier focus on training, equipping, and assisting the Iraqi forces.” But, he added, the 140,000 U.S. forces based in Iraq will continue “disrupting terrorist sanctuaries, such as Fallujah, and keeping [the insurgents] on the run.” The most recent counterinsurgency sweep occurred September 10-11 in Tal Afar, a heavily Sunni-Turkmen city sixty miles east of the Syrian border, which was believed to have held around 500 insurgents. Although 156 rebels were reported killed, many of the insurgents were able to flee the city via underground tunnels. After a similar strike by U.S. forces in Tal Afar last year, insurgents melted away, only to later reclaim the city once the U.S. military pulled out. Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, compares such counterinsurgency campaigns to attacking water with one’s fist. The trouble, he says, is the city only remains “secure as long as large numbers of coalition forces are there, but then you have this return of the insurgents. The net effect over time is really minimal, if anything.” Juan Cole, a University of Michigan history professor, worries this style of attack will only exacerbate tensions among ethnic Iraqis as well as tensions with the United States. “The U.S.-Iraqi government policy now appears to be to de-urbanize the Sunni Arab heartland by destroying Sunni cities one after another,” he writes in his blog on Middle Eastern politics. “The problem with such a tactic is that it will not actually reduce attacks on the U.S. military or the Iraqi police. It will just seed ethnic hatred for decades to come.” Khalil adds that the U.S. military strategy must be backed up by an economic strategy to defeat the insurgency. “In a lot of those towns, if you don’t follow up with lots of money for economic reconstruction, you’re doomed to failure,” he says. Khalil points to recent successes by U.S. forces in Sadr City and Najaf, where military campaigns were followed by infusions of capital to rebuild the regions. What other counterinsurgency strategies have been proposed? There have been a number of alternative strategies tabled in recent months. Among the most widely discussed: Wesley Clark, a retired Army general and former NATO commander, in an August 26 Washington Post op-ed recommended “winning the hearts and minds of the [Iraqi] populace through civic action, small-scale economic development and positive daily interactions.” He also urges the Pentagon to engage Iraq’s neighbors more in Iraq’s political and economic progress, to forswear establishing permanent bases in Iraq, and to add up to 10,000 Arab-American interpreters to bolster communication between U.S. troops and Iraqis, and to improve intelligence-gathering. He favors a gradual U.S. pullback of forces into reserve roles that will be eventually phased out. Krepinevich, writing in the September/October edition of Foreign Affairs, favors what he calls an “oil-spot strategy”—establish protected enclaves in parts of Iraq, perhaps Baghdad or Mosul, and then expand these zones of security, similar to how an oil spot spreads. This tactic worked for Britain during its Malayan insurgency in the 1950s. Krepinevich says his strategy “would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more [U.S. troop] casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit at far lower force levels than are engaged at present.” Cole, in an August 22 blog entry, outlines a ten-point plan that, among other suggestions, includes lowering the U.S. troop profile by pulling forces out of major cities, offering more military aid to protect key government officials, granting amnesty to all former Baathists with no blood on their hands, holding regular meetings with the foreign ministers of Iraq’s neighbors on issues like multinational assistance, and providing reconstruction funds to Iraqi firms only, not to U.S. corporations. Like Clark, Cole also favors a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces. Have Iraq’s insurgents shifted tactics?Some experts say attacks by insurgents are increasingly motivated by sectarian tensions, as highlighted by a stampede killing nearly 1,000 Shiite pilgrims in late August, reportedly set off by rumors of a Sunni suicide bomber within the crowd. Further, insurgents, particularly foreign jihadis, appear to be increasingly striking soft targets like Iraqi civilians and security forces instead of U.S. forces. July saw the most fatalities of Iraqi police and soldiers since the start of the war. Insurgents have also increasingly employed so-called swarm tactics, rapidly converging from several directions on a single target. These swarms often begin with a series of car bombs, followed by a rush of fighters armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades. In addition, news reports suggest a trend by insurgents toward suicide attacks and car bombs. The frequency of such suicide attacks has picked up since the end of April, when Iraq’s new government was formed. The number of car bombs (which are mostly suicide attacks) in Iraq has increased from roughly twenty per month last summer to 135 per month in April and May this year, according to the Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index. Khalil, however, warns against reading too much into short-term trends and numbers. “You can’t give metrics to the insurgency because it’s so fluid,” he says. What explains this surge in suicide attacks?Experts point to several factors. The obvious answer is their effectiveness, says Mia Bloom, author of Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror. “[A suicide attack] kills six times as many people as regular terrorist tactics. It wounds twelve times as many. And it really gets a lot more press,” she said in a CNN interview July 18. There’s also a clear linkage between the suicide bombings and the strategic success of Iraq’s insurgency, says Peter Bergen, Schwartz fellow at the New America Foundation and author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin Laden. Suicide attacks have hobbled reconstruction efforts in Iraq, as exemplified in 2003, when bombings of the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations prompted both organizations to pull most of their personnel out of Baghdad. Suicide bombers are also efficient. “It doesn’t take as much training as, for example, putting a bomb on a subway car in such a way that nobody will notice,” says Jessica Stern, a terrorism expert at Harvard University. A secondary explanation, says Scott Atran, director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, is that kidnappings and beheadings, both commonplace last year, have fallen somewhat out of favor. “Suicide bombings have a religious and ideological aura that beheadings never did,” he says, adding that beheadings were “not seen as a legitimate means of slaughter or sacrifice for God.” Does Iraq’s insurgency appear to be following the pattern of past insurgencies?It still may be too soon to tell. Insurgencies, after all, are generally fought over years, not months, so their evolution cannot be measured in such a short time period, experts say. “In modern military history they have lasted, on average, ten to fifteen years, and many—Palestine, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam—have gone more than a quarter-century,” wrote Thomas X. Hammes, a former Marine colonel, in an April 21 New York Times op-ed. Insurgencies generally undergo three phases: the first is the organizational and recruiting phase, which is largely nonviolent; the second phase entails guerilla-style, hit-and-run attacks, as well as attempts by insurgents to grab and hold territory; and phase three involves larger, more conventional force-on-force attacks against the government in charge. Experts disagree over whether the Iraqi insurgency is following a similar pattern, and if so, which phase the insurgency has entered. “It’s not proceeding along the classical lines of what people consider a Maoist insurgency,” White says.

This publication is now archived. IntroductionRelations between Iraq and its Arab neighbors have worsened in recent weeks, highlighted by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s September 5 criticism of Arab leaders for failing to express sympathy or offer aid in the wake of the August 31 stampede that left nearly 1,000 Iraqi Shiites dead. “We stood with our Arab brothers in their hard times,” Talabani told reporters, referring to recent terrorist attacks in Egypt; he called their silence “gross negligence.” The stampede marked the largest one-day death toll since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.Talabani was also responding to criticism from Arab leaders about Iraq’s newly drafted constitution, experts say. Amre Moussa, secretary of the Arab League, of which Iraq is one of the founding members, admonished Iraqi leaders for failing to meet Sunni demands to include a provision in the constitution calling Iraq an Arab state as well as an Islamic country. Talabani, a Kurd, says such a provision is unnecessary and unfair to Iraq’s religious and ethnic minorities. “The other [Arab constitutions] do not have this text…Why do they not make such a demand from Sudan? Why this insistence on demanding it from Iraq? They know Iraq is a multinational country,” Talabani said. Iraqi leaders have also criticized their Arab neighbors for not establishing diplomatic missions in Baghdad. U.S. and Iraqi leaders say restoring their presence would help bolster the new government’s legitimacy. But Arab leaders say deploying diplomats to Iraq is still too dangerous, particularly after an Egyptian and two Algerian diplomats were slain by foreign insurgents in July. Arab foreign ministers are slated to hold a meeting in Cairo October 1 to address, among other issues, restoring full-fledged diplomatic relations with Iraq . Foreign financing of the Iraqi insurgencyIraqi leaders have recently accused neighboring Arab states, especially Jordan and Syria , of abetting the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq by allowing Baathist sympathizers to finance insurgent activity from abroad. In Jordan, for instance, many of these finances flow from relatives of Saddam Hussein, who “have huge sums of money.” They “are supporting political and media activities and other efforts to revive the Baath Party,” Laith Kubba, a spokesman for Iraq ’s prime minister, told the New York Times August 22. Jordan’s King Abdullah, one of the United States’ staunchest allies in the region, has not commented publicly about the accusations but claims his country has been tough on terrorism by securing its long border with Iraq and clamping down on extremist organizations based in Jordan. Jordanian officials have arrested several members of the al-Haramein Brigades and al-Qaeda in Iraq , the terrorist group led by Jordanian-born Abu al-Zarqawi that was allegedly behind the August 19 Katyusha rocket attack that nearly struck a U.S. warship in a Jordanian port. The financing comes largely from private, not public, sources, experts say. “I suppose if Saddam had lots of money outside of Iraq, it’s just a guess, maybe some of this money is used to finance the Baathists,” says Reuven Paz, an Israeli terrorism expert. “As to Iraq’s Islamic [insurgency], I suspect it comes from private Saudi sources.” Still, some Iraqi leaders suspect the authorities in these Arab states are turning a blind eye to the flow of funds. “There’s no reason for these states to support [this financing] except for their general sympathy for their fellow Sunnis,” says Jeffrey White, Berrie Defense fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Some experts say Iraq’s charges against Jordan are overblown. The country has begun to curb the activities of its large Iraqi community of Baathist sympathizers. “The Jordanian government is looking much more closely at [Saddam’s] family and restricting them and their activities,” says Joost Hiltermann, Middle East project director at the International Crisis Group. But more could be done, says Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant secretary of terrorist financing and financial crimes at the U.S. Treasury, who urged Jordan in July to enact tougher laws against money laundering and develop better financial intelligence. Arab views on Iraqi federalismMany of Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors are uneasy about Iraqi federalism—the division of power and wealth between its regions and Baghdad. Moussa, who heads the Arab League, called the constitution’s clauses on federalism “dangerous” and “a recipe for chaos.” Some Arab leaders fear the splintering of Iraq into oil-rich regions run by Kurds in the north and Shiite clerics in the south. “The mainline view [in the Arab world] is Iraq should stay together and stay an effective political unit,” White says. “Their concern is that Kurdish autonomy and potentially Shiite autonomy will leave some kind of rump of a state left over [for Sunnis].” Other Arab leaders are worried by what they perceive as Iran’s growing influence over Iraq’s Shiite leadership, experts say. Earlier this year, King Abdullah of Jordan warned Iraq ’s leadership against creating a “Shiite crescent,” stretching from Iran to Lebanon. “The Jordanians fear the new Iraqi government has been taken over by Iranian sympathizers and is basically a proxy for Iran,” Hiltermann says. “They fear radical Shiites of the [Ayatollah] Khomeini brand are going to take over the Gulf and its oil. Keep in mind Jordan has no oil.” Arab views on Iraqi insurgencyA small but visible number of the insurgents in Iraq hail from Arab states in the region, namely Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Jordan. Some Iraqi leaders have accused these states, particularly Syria, of not doing enough to shut down the insurgency’s “underground railroad” over Iraq’s borders, White says. “No question Syria has a good idea of what’s going on. It’s a question of using the powers of a police state to chase down and extradite those involved in the insurgency.” Jordan, for example, is doing much more to stem the flow of insurgents—and financing—into Iraq than Syria, despite the fact that “the Jordanian state is weaker than the Syrian state,” says Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “The Jordanian security forces are very organized and they do their best to protect the border from any attack from Jordanian soil either toward Israel or toward Iraq,” Paz says. Hence, most smuggling of insurgents into Iraq—and U.S. combat missions designed to stop it—is occurring along the Iraq-Syria border. There appears to be widespread sympathy among the Arab people for Iraq’s Sunni insurgency, experts say, particularly in Jordan, with its sizable population of Palestinian and Iraqi refugees largely hostile to U.S. foreign policy in the region. “Jordan is a very important base for the development of local jihad,” Paz says, but argues that average Jordanians do not support the Sunni or foreign jihadi insurgents in Iraq. A July poll by the Pew Research Center, however, found that Jordan was the only Middle East country where support for suicide bombings against civilians, in Iraq or elsewhere, has risen. Another Pew poll released in June found just 21 percent of Jordanians had a favorable impression of the United States.

Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab constitutions, who has closely studied the evolution of the Iraqi draft constitution, says the results of the drafting committee were “a disappointment” because they failed to gain a national consensus, and this has left the document flawed. He says the best result would actually be if, in the scheduled October 15 referendum, Iraqi voters actually reject the constitution. This would require a coalition of Sunni and disaffected Shiite voters in three of Iraq’s eighteen provinces, something that will be difficult to achieve.“Rejection of the constitution would be an embarrassment for the Bush administration, but for the long-term future of Iraq, I think it might actually be a way to turn a constitutional process into a real mechanism for political settlement,” says Brown, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on leave from George Washington University. He adds that this might produce more flexible negotiators on all sides.Brown was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org, on August 29, 2005.The Iraqi drafting commission has now published a constitution, which was not actually voted on by the National Assembly, but which is supposed to go to the voters in a referendum October 15. There’s a lot of back and forth over whether this is a good document, a bad document, etc. What’s your general feeling about it?Procedurally, it ended in a bit of a mess. This is both because the Sunni members of the drafting committee basically rejected it, and also in a more legal sense, the parliament never voted on it. So what is going to be submitted to voters is a draft completed by a committee rather than one that was approved by a parliament, as was required in the [interim constitution, the] Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). I’m not sure those legal points make as much difference as the fact that this is a document that does not have consensus support.In terms of the substance, it’s a draft that, in my mind, doesn’t really resolve an awful lot of the issues that were dividing Iraqis. A constitution doesn’t have to resolve all the issues, but the number [of them] left unresolved is fairly large—perhaps excessively large.Why don’t you go through the major problems?Well, the biggest issue by far is what is referred to as federalism, but even that word was a subject of contention. Essentially, the question is: What is going to be the power and the authorities of the central government? What is going to be the power and authorities of the various regions, which consist of several provinces? And what is going to be the authority of the provinces? Some of that is spelled out, and actually, the division of authority is spelled out in some detail. And matters—for instance, like the division of oil revenues—are left a little bit ambiguous and still have to be settled.But the really big unsettled question is: Are we going to see an Iraq that consists of a central government and a bunch of provinces, plus a Kurdish region? Or are other provinces, especially the Shiite provinces [in southern Iraq], going to come together and form separate regions? That was really one of the central sticking points that prevented Sunni endorsement of the draft.In other words, the Sunnis are able to live with the Kurds because they’ve been living with them for years now, but they are fearful of a southern Shiite state?Exactly. The Kurdish region has been effectively autonomous since 1991. It’s unclear how much the Arab Sunni population accepts that. But at least those people who are participating in the drafting said, “That’s water under the bridge and we’re not going to try to undo that. We may try to limit it from going any further, but we’re not going to try and recreate a highly centralized state including Kurdistan.” The rest of the country was a very different issue, especially when Shiite talk of federalism escalated in the final days and weeks before the text was finalized. The Sunnis dug in their heels, as did the Shiite negotiators. Of course, there are some Americans who advocated federalism all along. What is bad about the Shiites having their own autonomous region like the Kurds do?If it’s really just a matter of federalism, I think it would be unusual in the region but it wouldn’t necessarily be a disaster or unworkable. But there are suspicions that what the Shiites are pushing for is a little bit more than simply a measure of administrative decentralization. If you were to take a large number of [predominantly] Shiite provinces—people have said there are as many as nine or ten, which is essentially half the country [which has eighteen provinces]—and form them as a region, and you take the three Kurdish provinces and form them as a region, those regions would be where most of Iraq’s oil resources are located. Then, perhaps, you’re setting up the stage for dissolution of the state. In fact, it seems to me that the strong insistence by some Shiite leaders, not by all of them, on having the ability to form a large region, is in a sense an insurance policy. If the central government in Iraq does not hold, they can still go their separate way. What would the Sunnis like, ideally?Ideally, they would want a centralized state. It is a standard in the region. Iraq was not something invented by Saddam Hussein, but it was how Iraq was governed since it achieved independence from Great Britain [in 1932]. Beyond that, the Arab Sunni population is divided. You have some very secular members of the Sunni community and some who want to see an Islamic state.The constitution calls for an Islamic state, right?It doesn’t call for an Islamic state per se, and actually, the final draft mentions Islam much less than some of the intermediate drafts did. But it potentially has a really strong formula for requiring that all laws passed conform to the Islamic sharia [traditional Islamic law].And what does that mean to laymen?It’s not clear what it means because a lot of these issues have simply not been spelled out in detail. But what it seems to mean, is that the parliament can’t pass a law that violates the provisions of Islamic law. Now the question is: Who’s deciding what those provisions are? Who’s deciding what Islamic law is? A law passed by parliament does not have to conform with the principles of Islamic law, but with more specific provisions. So that’s a more specific formulation than was anticipated.The constitution also creates a federal supreme court that will interpret the constitution and [whose members] can include experts in Islamic law. The exact structure of the federal supreme court is not spelled out in the constitution; it has to be spelled out in a law passed by parliament. So, we don’t know exactly what shape it will take, but there’s a possibility it will have a more Islamic coloration than we would have thought previously.There’s been a lot of concern in theUnited Statesand in Iraq about how this affects women.The problem is that Islamic law is a legal tradition more than a thousand years old, and it’s very rich and very diverse. So the question is not whether Islamic law will be applied, but who’s going to be interpreting it and applying it. And therefore, putting clerics on the supreme court might have the effect of enshrining more traditional interpretations of Islamic law.I would also say that the main thing the constitution does is empower the majority. Whoever wins in the parliament will have an awful lot of leeway in determining how this constitution operates. And if you have an Islamist majority in parliament, as seems quite likely, they will almost certainly pass laws based on fairly traditional interpretations of Islamic law. Will this mean a setback for women’s rights? In some areas, it probably does mean a setback for women’s rights, especially on personal-status law. Again, that’s something that’s unclear; it’s something parliament will have to write a law on. But it is likely they will write a law that will mean more traditional interpretations of Islamic law, which are probably less favorable to women.Is there still a provision for having a certain percentage of women in the parliament?Yes. The women’s groups did win on this, or at least they won a partial victory. What they were pushing for was an increase in the quota in parliament beyond the current 25 percent; for it to be [a] permanent [quota], rather than just a transitional measure; and they were pushing for it to extend beyond the parliament to other decision-making positions. They won only one of those three demands. It’s still at 25 percent, it was not increased. It is only for the parliament, not other positions. But they did succeed in making it part of the permanent constitution rather than just a transitional measure for one or two elections.Is that a large number of women for the Arab world? I guess it is.It’d be a large number of women for the United States. I think for most countries, it would be a fairly large number.I saw reports today that some Sunnis are saying the constitution’s still negotiable, that it’s not the final word, that there might be some way of reaching a compromise. Does that give you a sense that things are not locked in yet?Yes, I think it is possible to continue negotiations. Remember, this is not a draft that has been approved by parliament. It’s simply been written by a constitutional commission and changes were made even after the extended deadline of August 22. All along, many of those involved in the process have said, “We can still make changes even after the final draft—or what’s called the final draft—is presented.” Legally, I think that’s an extremely questionable statement. But they’re getting away with it. So I think it’s quite possible for the negotiations to continue.The real question is: Will a little bit more time result in any significant differences? The gap between the Shiite and Sunni negotiators, in particular, has grown very strong. The tone of political discussions in Iraq among the negotiators has gotten a little bit nasty and a little bit sectarian. So I’m not sure that more negotiations would necessarily lead to a different result. But it is politically possible.What kind of compromise would have to take place to appease the Sunnis, if that’s possible?I think the main thing that would have to happen would be that the Shiites give up on the idea of forming a large Shiite region. I think Sunnis could probably live with some regions other than the Kurdish region, but they would have to be smaller, perhaps limited to three provinces. And the Sunnis might want to have a very strong check at the national level on creating such regions so they couldn’t be formed without strong consensual support from the center.The central government now is supposed to control the oil revenue, is that correct?Yes, it is supposed to control the oil revenue, but again there’s ambiguity here as well. It’s supposed to work with the regional and provincial governments on it. There’s also a provision that those regions that have been historically discriminated against in receiving oil revenues or the benefits of oil revenues can receive a disproportionate share for an undefined transitional period.If they had to vote today instead of in October, would enough Sunnis turn out to reject the constitution?That’s a very important question. In a sense, the Sunni population of Iraq is faced with a dilemma: Do they turn out to vote against the constitution and therefore legitimize the process, or do they stay out of it completely and not legitimize the process while also virtually ensuring that the constitution passes? It’s clear that there’s a very strong trend within the Sunni community to actually turn out and vote. It’s not clear how many will actually vote. If those Sunnis who want to vote against the constitution do manage to turn out the vote, it will still be hard to ensure the constitution’s rejection unless they get some other parties on board as well.The interesting factor here is [Shiite cleric] Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement, which is wavering between boycotting and opposing the constitution. If Sadr’s movement acts to vote against the constitution, then I think there’s some hope for those who want it rejected. What you need [to reject the constitution in the referendum] is a two-thirds majority in any three provinces. That [Shiite] movement, together with the Sunni movement, would probably be enough to do it.Why is Sadr against this constitution?Well, it’s not completely clear. He’s a little mercurial in his politics and it’s not even clear the extent to which he’s in control of his own movement. But his stated reason [for opposing the constitution] is pretty much the same as the Sunnis’, that it is a formula for the dissolution of Iraq as a single state.Did the United States get anywhere near what it wanted, or was it an accomplishment just getting a constitution? When we talked last in July, you lamented the fact that the Iraqis and Americans were rushing to write a constitution without enough time to really think about it. Did the United States push too hard to get this done on time?I think so. I think we were trying to do too many things at the same time. We cared about the content of the document, we cared about the process—that is, that the Sunnis get on board—and we cared that it get written on time. To try and do all three things at the same time proved impossible. In the end, what we’re left with is a constitution that really didn’t quite make the deadline but at least came close, yet fell short on the other two: The Sunnis participated but fell out at the last minute, and the content of the document is far less liberal than I think the United States would have wanted to see. I think the United States would have liked to see a constitution that did an awful lot more to enshrine liberal freedoms and democratic practices than this constitution will do.How does this constitution rank with other Arab constitutions?To some extent, that’s an unfair comparison because it will be operating in a very different political context. From the perspective of liberal and democratic freedoms, it’s actually fairly similar and in some ways weaker than some other constitutions in the region. For instance, freedom of expression is guaranteed within the bounds of public morality and public order, which is almost not guaranteeing it at all because almost all restrictions on freedom of speech are characterized as defending public morals or the public order. So that’s extremely weak language. Even by regional standards, it’s a little weak.But the reason I say it’s an unfair comparison is because the context in Egypt or in Syria is very, very different. You give that language, or similar language, to an Egyptian or Syrian government, which is dominated by the presidency, and they can use it to restrict the freedom of the press almost out of existence if they wish to. It’s not clear that you’ll have that kind of authoritarian government emerge in Iraq. I think the past couple of years have resulted in a much more pluralist political environment in Iraq. So the constitution itself is actually surprisingly weak on many freedoms and liberties, but the political system that results from it might allow for a little bit more than exists in other states in the region.What about the overall security issue? Is there any way this will at all enhance ending the insurgency in Iraq?No, I don’t think so. This insurgency is not about constitutional text. It’s not as if the insurgents have issued an alternative constitution, and had a few clauses been adopted, [the problem of the insurgency] would have been solved. The logic behind making the constitution central to solving the insurgency was that you could bring various parts of the population on board, especially the Arab Sunni population. And once they saw that they had a stake in the situation, the population would switch its support from the insurgents to the government. It’s fairly clear that’s not going to happen as a result of this text and this process. So, in that sense, it’s not going to fulfill the goal. It may have actually even aggravated the situation by emphasizing sectarian and religious issues that were always there in Iraqi politics, and now have been put on the surface.So if this constitution is accepted, what will happen?I think we’ll see a political situation that looks pretty much like the present situation. You’ll have new elections [for a new government December 15]. The new elections might result in a slightly different parliament, but I’m not sure they will result in a fundamentally different one. And then the parliament will have to sit down and write the laws that will make this constitution operate, and it will likely be Shiite-dominated with a strong Kurdish presence. There’s no likelihood that the Sunnis would vote in the December 15 election if their demands get turned down on the constitution, right?I think so. Even if they did vote, they would probably not vote in sufficient numbers to really change the balance in parliament. They might, but they would have to turn out in large numbers in order to do that. Well, the Sunnis must realize this because the possibility of it being rejected is actually slimmer than it being accepted. So is it possible, then, that some deal can still be struck?I think it’s possible. I think the negotiations, in spite of the way they broke down at the last minute, were being conducted in good faith. The Sunnis were willing to make all kinds of concessions, the Shiites were willing to make concessions. The Kurds were even actually willing to make some concessions. But the problem was that none of them were willing to make concessions on their core demands, and it’s not clear whether you can have a meaningful constitution unless they really do that.I don’t think it’s impossible to reopen negotiations, but even if you did, it would be so difficult to resolve these core issues that I’m not particularly optimistic about the result, at least in the short term. This may be the sort of thing that has to be reopened not over the next month or so, but over the next few years. So basically, you’re disappointed.Yes. I would say, in some ways, the best thing that could happen to Iraq in the long term would be the rejection of the constitution [in October], assuming that leads to the parties sitting down, starting over again, facing the abyss of complete civil war, and not partial civil war and dissolution of the country. And you’d also probably get new negotiators into the room. You might also have Sunnis enter the room that were elected, rather than appointed in a kind of ad hoc fashion. So rejection of the constitution would be an embarrassment for the Bush administration, but for the long-term future of Iraq, I think it might actually be a way to turn a constitutional process into a real mechanism for political settlement.

Federalism—the division of power between regional governments and Baghdad—is among the most controversial issues in Iraq’s new constitution. Tanya Gilly-Khailany, director of democracy programs at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington D.C.-based, nonprofit research organization, discusses the demands of Shiite and Kurdish leaders for more federalism in the south and north of Iraq and believes “the local population is best suited to govern itself.”Why are some Shiites calling for a semi-autonomous state in the south of Iraq?They believe it would create a balance in the country, since everyone should be entitled to form their own regional entities, not just the Kurds [in northern Iraq]. Now the Shiites are calling for nine out of Iraq’s eighteen provinces to be part of this southern federal region. But we must remember the southern provinces do not have the proper institutions in place; they don’t have a parliament as the Kurds do, nor the same government organizations. According to some religious Shiite leaders, the region’s oil wealth is for all Iraqis, but there was a proposal from some of these same leaders who want 90 percent of Basra’s oil wealth to stay in the region. Does the newly written constitution resolve this issue?The latest text of the constitution says that everyone in Iraq should have an equal share to its natural resources and wealth, which tells us the issue of oil wealth is at an acceptable level for all.  Is the Shiites’ request motivated more by economic or religious issues? Personally, I believe it’s religious. The Islamists believe having an autonomous region in the south is the best way to assert their power and keep in place their upper hand in these regions. Of course, Basra, having one of the biggest oil wells in the world and the only open seaport that connects Iraq to the rest of the world, would prove very profitable for them as well. What are the arguments against granting Shiites greater autonomy?The Sunnis argue that an autonomous region in the south threatens the territorial integrity of the Republic of Iraq. Secular Shiites fear this might grant excessive power to religious parties. Is the issue of federalism the same for the Kurds?For them, I believe it is more of a precautionary mechanism than anything else. They want to make sure they are the ones governing their lives and are not subjected to genocide and ethnic cleansing, as was the case under the many different [previous] Iraqi governments. The Kurds also want to go a little bit beyond what they have now. Yes, they want a decentralized Iraqi government and feel that laws pertaining to the Kurds should be passed by a Kurdish parliament that knows their society and culture best. But they also want a reversal of the Arabization process that took place under Saddam Hussein, where in many Kurdish cities, including [oil-rich] Kirkuk, Kurds were evicted and Arabs from the south and center of Iraq were brought in to change the demographics of the area. You hear a lot about Kirkuk and Kurds’ claims to the city. Do they primarily want the profits from oil? To the Kurds, Kirkuk is not about oil. It’s a city historically in Kurdistan, where they have lived for centuries; they were kicked out of their homes by force and had their livelihoods destroyed. It’s the place of their ancestors that they want to go back to. It has more of a sentimental value. Yes, Kirkuk has a big oil field, but I don’t think that’s the main motivating factor; and besides, it’s not an infinite supply of oil. But aren’t Iraq’s Shiites also motivated by sentimental reasons? After all, they too were oppressed by Saddam Hussein. Yes, but it’s interesting that [Shiites in the south] have less freedom now and are more afraid of speaking out because of some of these extremist entities who hold so much power and try to enforce sharia [traditional Islamic] law. For example, a while ago some students from the University of Basra had a mixed picnic and members of a religious militia attacked and killed one of the students. Would federalism rein in the Shiite and Kurdish militias? They will mostly be integrated into the Iraqi army. For example, in the case of the peshmerga [Kurdistan’s 100,000-strong security force], they would be part of a special Iraqi brigade but would receive orders from Kurdistan’s regional government, since they are stationed in the north, not in the center or south of Iraq. Shiite militias such as the Badr Brigade will be fully integrated into the Iraqi army and will receive orders from the Iraqi Defense Ministry. Are you concerned Iraq could come apart if these regions are granted too much autonomy?Definitely not. I think the [federalism] issue’s being overblown. All the sides have reaffirmed their commitment to the territorial integrity of Iraq. It won’t mean the disintegration of Iraq. The Kurds are smart enough to realize, at this point in time, it’s better for them to remain a part of Iraq. The Shiites will not break away either, since they have a high sense of Iraqi nationalism.  So you think the Kurds and Shiites are using this issue as a bargaining chip? Yes and no. For one, the notion of federalism has been agreed to by all different sides since, I think, 1991 or 1992, at the first opposition meeting that took place when the Iraqi National Congress [INC] was formed. One of the things they agreed on is that [federalism] should have been automatically included [in the constitution]. But mostly it’s the Sunnis who have had the hardest time with the notion of federalism, by not understanding what the term means. For example, they were happy to switch the word “federalism” with the word “united.”  What are the main advantages of federalism? Federalism is a mechanism by which different people are given a degree of autonomy and self-rule within a united structure. Therefore, one of its biggest advantages is it ensures Iraq will remain a united country. We have to understand that Iraq is a very diverse country with many religions and cultures. Also, a lot of people are not willing to go back to the times of Saddam Hussein, when all things were dictated by the center. Is federalism popular among most Shiites in the south?The sense I have is there’s a disconnect between the Shiite populace and the Islamist parties. If the general population looked at the issue of federalism economically, they would see that they’d benefit more from a federal arrangement. Others might think [if they’re granted more regional autonomy] they may not be persecuted by the state, so they see it as form of security blanket. But the biggest problem I’ve noticed in Iraq is people don’t fully understand what federalism means. So you sound very much in favor of some form of regional federalism. I’m very much for a confederation of these different regions and provinces, since I believe the local population is best suited to govern itself. These regions should go about their own business and just be loosely connected to a federal government. Under the current conditions, it won’t be too bad for the Kurds, but it would have been better to have more rights granted to them. In the south, if the Shiites want to come together to form a federal state, I support it also, but it must be the vote of the people and not imposed on them. But couldn’t this region mirror Iran’s government, a theocratic-style Islamic state?No, because most Iraqis do not associate themselves with Iran or its culture. The model I predict we’ll have is something closer to Indonesia or Malaysia. That is, it will be a democracy, but the constitution will have language that supports Islam.

Clark Lombardi, an assistant professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law and expert on Islamic and constitutional law, says the role of religion in a future Iraq and federalism remain the thorniest issues facing the drafters of Iraq’s constitution. “Federalism is one of the toughest issues in any country, including our own,” Lombardi says. “In Iraq, a choice will have to be made that has enormous ramifications, not only in the short term, but really in the medium and long term for Iraqis. And to some extent, the possibility of holding the country together depends on how carefully these provisions are drafted.”Lombardi says he does not expect the insurgency to slacken in coming months, as Iraqis go to the polls to ratify the constitution and elect a new assembly. The author of a forthcoming book on Egypt, “State Law as Islamic Law in Modern Egypt: The Incorporation of Sharia into Egyptian Constitutional Law,”Lombardi was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor for cfr.org, on August 17, 2005.Members of the constitutional draft committee are still at work. They’ve extended their work and have a new deadline of late Monday. What is your general feeling about the work so far on this constitution? Well, clearly it’s had a lot of bumps along the way. The Sunni members have absented themselves from discussions at periodic times. But constitution drafting is always something of an ugly process. This one was done under extraordinary time pressure and extraordinary political pressure and with a lot of assistance—or interference, depending on how you view it—from the international community. I think one would expect this process would be a little more difficult than many, and it’s probably gone as well as could be expected under the circumstances.They started late, I guess, on drafting this. They didn’t even get the committee together until the government was formed, right?It’s been an extraordinarily fast process, and they’ve been working under a very rigid timeline set by the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL). So, they’ve really had to squeeze their activities into a box that was set before they started, as opposed to one that they decided they were comfortable with.Now the draft administrative law did allow them to have a six-month delay, if the assembly approved. Your colleague, Nathan Brown, thought that would have been a wise move, but he said that politically it was impossible given the pressure from the United States to get it done quickly. Do you agree? Should they have taken more time, or was that not really politically possible?Maybe they should have taken more time and maybe it wasn’t really politically possible at the same time. I think Nathan was probably correct on both fronts. Obviously, they should have taken some more time because they have taken some more time and they’ve done it in a way that’s not permitted by the law, which is a very awkward situation that everybody has decided to ignore for the time being.You mean the one-week delay?The one-week delay is not anticipated in the TAL. It said that by August 15 the draft has to be finished and then it will be published. Now, there are several ways you could justify the delay. You could say it was finished except for a few provisions, which need to be looked at, and that seems to be what they’re saying. But it’s a bit of an awkward argument to make.Let’s go to the main issues we know are out there. Over the entire period of drafting or at least for the last couple of weeks, there have been comments from drafters that consistently talk about eighteen open issues. Some of these are clearly more significant than others. Some of them are largely symbolic and some of them have real consequences, so the eighteen points are not all created equal.Has the official name of the country been worked out?To the best of my knowledge that has been worked out. These things are of fairly significant symbolic importance, but on the other hand, if somebody wants to make a deal, if somebody understands what they want their state to look like, this usually is not the sort of issue that’s going to prevent agreement. But some of these other issues are really quite deep and broad, and they implicate a lot of areas of the constitution. The constitution will have to be drafted around agreement that’s reached on some of these issues.OK. So what are the key issues?Religion is one. Some people say what’s really important is the precise formula by which sharia will be characterized as a source of law. It’s pretty clear the constitution will [make] Islamic sharia a source of law or the chief source of law. Frankly, I don’t think the language that they choose is particularly important, but there are areas in which the role of Islam will be very important to the members of the Iraqi community. For instance, in the area of family law, there has been a dispute about whether the courts should apply a body of national law that has been determined to be consistent with the broad principles of Islamic sharia, or whether the constitution should require that the courts apply to every Iraqi individual the traditional Islamic family law from the sect or from the school of law to which they normally belong. It could be quite a significant difference.So in other words, a secular Shiite could find himself living under very strict religious laws?That is true, although it probably would work the other way; that what you’d have are Shiites who wish to be under a strict Shiite law, and instead what’s being applied is sort of a compromised body of Islamic law that applies to all Muslims, whether they’re Shiite or Sunni, throughout the country. That would make a conservative person unhappy as much as the situation you described.The real debate is simply this: Some people want the parliament to establish a unified code of family law that will be drafted with an eye to Islamic principles broadly speaking, but will apply to everybody, no matter what sect. And other people would like to have the courts apply to them, their children, and their families the traditional body of Islamic law that normally governs people from their sect or from their school of law. Those [laws] would result in very different situations on the ground for people.And we don’t know how they’re going to cut a compromise on this?We don’t know. When people talk about Islam being an issue, it’s not only the larger question of whether Islam will be a source or the source of legislation going forward, but it’s also issues like [family law] that actually have to be put in the constitution. The constitution will probably have some specific language about what type of law will apply in the area of personal-status or family law.What about federalism?Federalism is one of the toughest issues in any country, including our own. In Iraq, a choice will have to be made that has enormous ramifications, not only in the short term, but really in the medium and long term for Iraqis. And to some extent, the possibility of holding the country together depends on how carefully these provisions are drafted.What are the issues?There are a number of issues. It’s been said by some, that some communities, particularly the Kurds, would like to have a right of secession enshrined in the constitution. U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad has said that’s actually not an issue. I have no idea how to read the tea leaves in something like that. But that would be an enormous issue, surely, as to whether areas or regions of the country have the right to secede if they’re unhappy with the development of things going forward. But the issues of federalism are much more subtle, and they stretch widely. They include: How do you structure the national assembly? What areas [the federal government] is allowed to legislate in and what areas the regional legislatures are allowed to legislate in is an enormously tricky subject; the relationship between regional courts and national courts—who has supremacy? How regional judges are appointed; how can they be removed? All of these issues are ones that will have to be resolved once basic agreement is reached on the strength of a federal state the Iraqis want to create. One of the reasons it’s taking so long is that even if you reach basic agreement on the larger principle, the actual drafting of these provisions is enormously tricky.And, of course, oil gets into this, right?There are very serious disputes about how to divide oil revenues. Iraq is, of course, a major oil producer. Typically, the natural resources belong to the state. At some level the Iraqi state owns the oil and will have the right to the revenues from it. The constitution will probably have some provision that explains how to divide the revenues from this oil. And certain communities are asking for a constitutional guarantee that they will get “X” percent.That’s primarily the Kurds and the Shiites in the south?Well, between those two, that accounts for the majority of Iraqis. I think all Iraqis are deeply concerned about this; the Sunnis, who are sitting in the area of the country that does not have much oil, are enormously concerned that essentially the constitution—especially at the very beginning—will provide to other communities and other regions the vast majority of Iraq’s wealth, and they’ll be sort of doomed to be impoverished from the start.Is the creation of a “Kurdistan” part of the issue?The issue of federalism and Kurdistan are largely the same issue. There are questions about what the national language of the country will be and there are certain symbolic issues that are of concern to the Kurds. Many people think of them as secular or moderate Muslims and that Islamism is not really as important in Kurdistan as in the Shiite or the Sunni regions of the country. So the Kurds have their own unique concerns in really almost every area of the constitution that is being debated.But their biggest concern, of course, is federalism. The Kurds would like a national state that leaves enormous power to the regions to govern themselves and have access to the revenues from the oil that’s found in their lands and potentially even to secede.The issue of Kirkuk is part of the same question?Kirkuk is an enormously tricky issue. It’s very much one of the issues that the Kurds are deeply concerned with because they consider Kirkuk to be a Kurdish city. What makes Kirkuk particularly difficult is that it actually has communities—most of the discussions in Iraq are focusing entirely on the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite communities—but Kirkuk actually has a large Turkmen population; there are Chaldeans [Christians] in the area and these communities have friends in neighboring countries. And so the question of Kirkuk is one that’s important not only to the Iraqis but also to Iraq’s neighbors.If they get a constitution approved by the assembly in the next week or so, is that going to have any impact on the insurgency?That’s really hard to say. It depends, in part, on exactly how robust the agreement they reach is. If this is merely something they present under enormous pressure but which does not really have the impassioned support of all the communities, then you’re still going to have tremendous divisions in the country. Even if there were strong support and all the factions were involved in the drafting process, we still have to move toward a referendum in October. And the insurgency will clearly see that as its next best chance to disrupt the formation of an Iraqi state. I would think the insurgency would go forward at full steam, certainly through the referendum that’s scheduled for October.Then, even after that, if the new constitution is not only presented and approved, there still has to be a set of elections for a new assembly in December; obviously that’s a time in which there could be considerable mischief. That’s quite likely because one thing that’s clear is this constitution punts on a lot of hard issues. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to say, but we’re pretty sure that it’s going to take some hard issues and leave them to be resolved by some legislation in the future.[The constitution] will simply say that there are certain issues of great importance that will have to be resolved by law in the parliament. And so who gets elected to the parliament in December—assuming the best possible scenario going forward—will have the most impact in Iraq in the future. So even those elections will be of grave interest to the entire Iraqi people and really be another source of strife upon which insurgents will focus. So I really see that there’ll be violence in Iraq, unfortunately, for a considerable period of time.